Kinematic analysis of a rice transplanting mechanism with eccentric planetary gear trains

Although eccentric gear trains have been found useful in agricultural machi nery such as rice transplanting machines, lack of a theoretic study on kine matics and dynamics of it has led to some difficulty to further improve the performances of the system. The main contribution of this paper is to deve lop the so-called kinematic parametric equation (kinematic model) for an ec centric planetary gear train without introducing the assumptions which are mainly related to the eccentricity of the system. A comparison of our kinem atic model with the measured results achieved by Tatsuya Konishi et al. is also provided. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.