Second Grant Awarded for Novel Gearing System

A second grant was awarded to the CDME through the FY 2016 Edison Advance Manufacturing Program (AMP). This time for $330,978, to be contributed to the development of a high performance, low-cost, compact, lightweight and durable gear reducing system with the flexibility to easily create multiple specific gearing ratios. Such a gearing system would provide robotics industries with a lower cost, more efficient and more flexible gearing system that has a much longer lifecycle.

It has been over 25 years since a revolutionary innovation has occurred in the specialty precision gear market developed to support, among other applications, industrial and humanoid robotics. These currently utilize Harmonic Drives and RV drives which are still fundamentally the same drive systems envisioned in their original patent filings. After a long and highly reputable career spent in robotics research dealing with the shortcoming of these existing gearing systems, Dr. Yuan Zheng, of The Ohio State University, invented and patented a very novel gearing system. This system, which he named the “Circular Wave Drive”, alleviates many of the shortcoming of the Harmonic Drive and RV gears at a fraction of the cost and with increased durability and estimated lifecycle. OSU’s Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence worked with the licensing company, Circular Wave Drive, LLC to develop prototypes of the innovation and test the results to ensure the gear could be implemented in various manufacturing systems.

CDME’s primary goal of this project is to fully optimize the design and make manufacture ready the gearing systems contemplated by two pending patent applications for the CWD gearing system. CDME will fully design and test a series of gear sizes and ratios with various materials which are based on the preliminary designs already created and tested by the center. The objective is to begin manufacturing of the gear systems at the end of the 18 month project and to deliver them to Ohio-based companies for implementation into their manufacturing systems. This project provides a real and tangible set of results that immediately impact the manufacturing sector in Ohio.

To learn more about this technology, click here.