Processing Method of Gearbox with Non-Circular Gear Train and Its Application in Rice Potted Seedling Transplanting Mechanism

A non-circular gear train has the advantages of compact structure, easy to achieve dynamic balance, and is often used to drive an end-effector to achieve complex trajectory and attitude. The gearbox is the key component of non-circular gear train, which has complex structure, and requires high precision of each wheel shaft hole and its relative position. Conventional methods often use numerical control process tools to process the gearbox with non-circular gear train. The processing cost is too high, and there are some problems, such as shaft hole deflection and it can be difficult to ensure the phase position. This research has proposed a processing method of the gearbox with non-circular gear train and developed the corresponding combination tool. Taking the gearbox of a rice potted seedling transplanting mechanism as an example, a special cutting tool with five boring tools was designed which can process five holes at one clamping, and greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of gearbox processing. The processed gearbox and other parts were assembled into a rice potted seedling transplanting mechanism and assembled into a rice potted seedling transplanting process to conduct a seedling transplanting performance experiment. The results show that the processing of the gearbox with non-circular gear train satisfies the requirement of processing accuracy, and the transplanting mechanism can accurately complete seedling picking, transporting, planting, and other series of actions. The processing method is suitable for the large-scale manufacturing of transplanting mechanism. In this research, aiming at the double arm transplanting mechanism of high-speed rice potted seedling transplanting, the gearbox was analyzed, and a processing method of the gearbox was proposed.