Harmonic Drive and RV Reducer in Advanced Manufacturing

In the era of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, the global intelligent manufacturing industry has carried out fierce competition, mainly focused on industrial robots. In line with this trend, China's theoretical research and production of industrial robots are continuously advancing, and a relatively complete industrial robot industry chain has been established. Precision reducers, as one of the core components of industrial robots, are closely related to the production and sales of industrial robots. Currently, the precision reducers used in industrial robots mainly include RV reducers and harmonic reducers.

What are the differences between the two? Let's analyze it together.

In industrial robots, RV reducers are mostly used for the "large joints" of robots, such as the base and shoulders, which are important active joints. On the other hand, harmonic reducers are used as transmission components in the "small joints" of the robot's arms, wrists, and other parts. The structure of harmonic reducers is simple, with high transmission accuracy, a large transmission ratio, and an efficiency of over 90%, making them often used in occasions with high requirements for robot control accuracy.

RV reducers have a compact structure, low vibration, and low energy consumption, with the characteristics of two-stage reduction and strong stability of the disk. Compared to simple cycloidal pinwheel planetary transmission, they have a smaller volume, stronger overload capacity, and greater rigidity of the output shaft, and are therefore widely used in industrial robots.
 

In terms of structure, harmonic gear reducers are usually composed of components such as wave generators, flexspline, circular spline, and flexible bearings. It consists of three basic concentric components: rigid cylindrical gear G, flexible cylindrical gear R, and wave generator H. RV reducers are developed on the basis of traditional cycloidal pinwheel reducers, consisting of cycloidal pinwheels and planetary supports, and are transmitted through solid steel, thus having particularly strong load-bearing capacity.
 

In terms of performance, harmonic transmission has the advantages of high motion accuracy, large transmission ratio, small mass, small volume, and small moment of inertia. Most importantly, it can transmit motion in a confined space, which is something that no other mechanical transmission can achieve. RV reducers are a new type of planetary reducer with superior performance.

Compared with other planetary transmissions, RV reducers have a wide range of transmission ratios, high transmission efficiency, strong load-bearing capacity, small volume, light weight, high accuracy, small return error, and long service life.
 

With the rapid development of intelligent manufacturing and high-end equipment fields such as industrial robots and high-end CNC machine tools, harmonic reducers and RV reducers have become widely used precision reducers in the field of high-precision transmission. In general, both of them have their own strengths and complement each other.