Investigation of a novel elastic-mechanical wheel transmission under light duty conditions

A novel ‘Elastic Engagement and Friction Coupled’ (EEFC) mechanical transmission has been proposed recently in which the power is transmitted through elastic tines on the surfaces of the driving and driven wheels. This study introduces new variations of EEFC mechanical wheel transmission (broadly emulating a gear-pair) with small contact areas for use under light duty conditions. Because a drive of this type inevitably has a strong statistical component, theoretical analysis of the geometrical and mechanical relationships has been attempted by using linear modeling and empirical weightings. Several simple forms of the EEFC wheel transmission are tested under limiting (slip) conditions for transmission force and transmission coefficients against normal load. Normalized standard deviation of these parameters is used to summarize noise performance. Models and experiments are in reasonable agreement, suggesting that the model parameters reflect important design considerations. EEFC transmissions appear well suited to force regimes of a few tenths of a newton and to have potential for use in, for example, millimetre-scale robots.