Exploring the rigidity of planar configurations of points and rods

In this article we explore the rigidity of realizations of incidence geometries consisting of points and rigid rods: rod configurations. We survey previous results on the rigidity of structures that are related to rod configurations, discuss how to find realizations of incidence geometries as rod configurations, and how this relates to the 2-plane matroid. We also derive further sufficient conditions for the minimal rigidity of k-uniform rod configurations and give an example of an infinite family of minimally rigid 3-uniform rod configurations failing the same conditions. Finally, we construct v3-configurations that are flexible in the plane, and show that there are flexible v3-configurations for all sufficiently large values of v.