Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Mobility of geometric constraint systems with e...

Electronic data

  • extrusion_sym_revised

    Accepted author manuscript, 11.6 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Mobility of geometric constraint systems with extrusion symmetry

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/06/2025
<mark>Journal</mark>Contributions to Algebra and Geometry
Issue number2
Volume66
Number of pages45
Pages (from-to)345-389
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date27/04/24
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

If we take a (bar-joint) framework, prepare an identical copy of this framework, translate it by some vector τ, and finally join corresponding points of the two copies, then we obtain a framework with ‘extrusion’ symmetry in the direction of τ. This process may be repeated t times to obtain a framework whose underlying graph has Z2t as a subgroup of its automorphism group and which has ‘t-fold extrusion’ symmetry. Extruding a framework is a widely used technique in CAD for generating a 3D model from an initial 2D sketch, and hence it is important to understand the flexibility of extrusion-symmetric frameworks. Using group representation theory, we show that while t-fold extrusion symmetry is not a point-group symmetry, the rigidity matrix of a framework with t-fold extrusion symmetry can still be transformed into a block-decomposed form in the analogous way as for point-group symmetric frameworks. This allows us to establish Fowler-Guest-type character counts to analyse the mobility of such frameworks. We show that this entire theory also extends to the more general point-hyperplane frameworks with t-fold extrusion symmetry. Moreover, we show that under suitable regularity conditions the infinitesimal flexes we detect with our symmetry-adapted counts extend to finite (continuous) motions. Finally, we establish an algorithm that checks for finite motions via linearly displacing framework points along velocity vectors of infinitesimal motions.