mpcGear: Multi-Point Conjugation Gear Mechanisms

摘要

Gears transmit rotary motion via meshing teeth, with circular gears commonly used to produce constant-speed rotation and non-circular gears enabling variable-speed rotation. In order to generate complex motion, gears are typically combined with other mechanical parts such as linkages, cam-followers, and belts, which often leads to complex structures and reduced transmission efficiency. To address these limitations, recent research has been investigating non-conventional gears that can transfer complex motion while preserving key properties of gears, such as compactness, high transmission efficiency, and load-bearing capability. In this paper, we present a new gear mechanism called the multi-point conjugation gear mechanism for exactly generating a user-specified 3D motion under external loads. The mechanism contains a single pair of gears modeled by a pair of conjugate surfaces with multiple conjugation points. We introduce an optimization-based approach that designs this new gear mechanism by modeling multiple sub-gear pairs that satisfy multi-point conjugation and fabricability requirements, whose load-bearing performance is quantified using a measure of dynamic form closure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by modeling various multi-point conjugation gear mechanisms that generate different kinds of motions, evaluating their kinematic performance and load-bearing performance using 3D printed prototypes, and presenting two application examples.