Dr. Pablo López García was born in Asturias, Spain, in 1972. He obtained a master´s degree in industrial engineering with the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Industrial de Gijón, Spain, in 1998. After 20 years working in the European automotive industry, he completed a doctorate with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium in 2022 on the potential of planetary gear transmissions in human-robot interaction. Since 2021, Pablo is an active member of the AGMA Committee on Robotics and Automation. His research interest are mechanical transmissions for modern robotic actuation.
The earliest example of a gear train dates to at least 2,000 B.C. when Chinese engineers built a chariot that used a complex planetary mechanism made of wooden gears to let a dragon head continuously point south when driven around (Ref. 1). In Greece, a surprisingly advanced Antikythera gearbox mechanism, incorporating at least 37 precisely crafted bronze gears, was built years later, between 205–60 B.C. (Ref. 2).
Today, gearboxes are inevitable in numerous applications requiring high power density including wind turbines, electric vehicles, cranes, robotics, etc. A combination of high-ratio gearboxes with high-speed, low-torque motors is often used to achieve high power density. Planetary gear trains (PGTs) help achieve a high gear ratio in a compact arrangement. Several configurations of planetary gears are widely studied in this article where the gear profiles used in these studies are primarily involute.
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