Stein Crispel was born in Halle, Belgium, in 1994. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium, in 2015, and a master’s degree in electromechanical engineering from the Bruface Joint Master Program, VUB and the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, in 2017. He is currently working toward a doctorate with the Multibody Mechanics and Robotics Research Group, VUB. Between September 2016 and January 2017, he participated in the Swiss–European Mobility Program for a study abroad with the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He received a fellowship from the Research Foundation—Flanders for his doctoral research. His research interests include the study and development of redundant and energy-efficient actuators for applications with varying loads and speeds. His research also focuses on gear transmissions capable of achieving very high gear ratios suitable to be used in combination with electrical actuators for robotics applications.
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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