KINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF ROLLER DRIVES
The roller drive is an epicyclic gearing that consists of both the planet gear and the annular sun gear with rollers as its teeth. The roller drive thus has the advantages of easy manufacturing and low cost, and also has attractive attributes including high speed reduction ratio, compact size, and light weight as an epicyclic gearing. In this paper, a mathematical modeling for the kinematic analysis based on the vector loop approach is developed. The position, velocity, and acceleration analyses for the roller drive are performed. Furthermore, an experimental test verifying the analysis results is achieved. The analysis results show that only a single pair of teeth is meshed during gearing. It also shows that the values of gear ratio are inherently fluctuated corresponding with the number of ring gear rollers. This undesirable fluctuation can be minimized if the selected values of the design parameters satisfy a specific four-linkage constraint.