Prof. dr. ir. Tom Verstraten received a master’s degree in electromechanical engineering and a doctorate from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in 2012 and 2018 respectively. In 2020, he became an assistant professor with the Robotics and Multibody Mechanics Research Group, VUB. He was awarded fellow- ships of the Research Foundation—Flanders for both his doctoral and postdoctoral research, as well as a Fulbright grant for visiting scholars for a research stay at the University of Tulsa from 2018–2019. He also worked in industry as an R&D Engineer with Aquasystems International, Halle, Belgium, from 2012–2013, and as a visiting researcher with Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, in 2017. His main research interests include study and development of energy-efficient actuation systems for robotic prostheses, exoskeletons, and collaborative robots, and elastic actuators and redundant actuation.
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.
Contact | Privacy Policy
©2025 Power Transmission Engineering
