A 2D rigidity circuit is a minimal graph G=(V,E) supporting a non-trivial stress in any generic placement of its vertices in the Euclidean plane. All 2D rigidity circuits can be constructed from K4 graphs using combinatorial resultant (CR) operations. A combinatorial resultant tree (CR-tree) is a rooted binary tree capturing the structure of such a construction. The CR operation has a specific algebraic interpretation, where an essentially unique circuit polynomial is associated to each circuit graph. Performing Sylvester resultant operations on these polynomials is in one-to-one correspondence with CR operations on circuit graphs. This mixed combinatorial/algebraic approach led recently to an effective algorithm for computing circuit polynomials. Its complexity analysis remains an open problem, but it is known to be influenced by the depth and shape of CR-trees in ways that have only partially been investigated. In this paper, we present an effective algorithm for enumerating all the CR-trees of a given circuit with n vertices. Our algorithm has been fully implemented in Mathematica and allows for computational experimentation with various optimality criteria in the resulting, potentially exponentially large collections of CR-trees.

Motivated by a rigidity-theoretic perspective on the Localization Problem in 2D, we develop an algorithm for computing circuit polynomials in the algebraic rigidity matroid associated to the Cayley-Menger ideal for $n$ points in 2D. We introduce combinatorial resultants, a new operation on graphs that captures properties of the Sylvester resultant of two polynomials in the algebraic rigidity matroid. We show that every rigidity circuit has a construction tree from $K_4$ graphs based on this operation. Our algorithm performs an algebraic elimination guided by the construction tree, and uses classical resultants, factorization and ideal membership. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we implemented our algorithm in Mathematica: it took less than 15 seconds on an example where a Groebner Basis calculation took 5 days and 6 hrs.