From graphs to tensegrity structures: Geometric and symbolic approaches

Abstract

A form-finding problem for tensegrity structures is studied; given an abstract graph, we show an algorithm to provide a necessary condition for it to be the underlying graph of a tensegrity in $\mathbb{R}^d$ (typically $d=2,3$) with vertices in general position. Furthermore, for a certain class of graphs our algorithm allows to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the relative position of the vertices in order to underlie a tensegrity, for what we propose both a geometric and a symbolic approach.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures; final versio