Since time immemorial, ancient philosophical texts have spiritually provoked people to awaken from the delusion incurred from being baffled at life’s myriad circumstances. Today’s rapid advance in applied science and technology has not only removed problems of daily activities such as transportation, communication, information exchange etc, but also has greatly improved our comfort and lifestyle. Despite such major benefits brought by globalization, mankind is facing higher levels of competition and the struggle for success is becoming intense in almost all professional fields such as research, medicine, commerce, management, production technology and intellectual property rights to name a few. As a result, our progress can be obscured by normal human tendencies to quickly achieve the desired results in short time, thus sacrificing on quality and other values that inevitably lead to failure and frustration due to possible conflicts. This paper sheds light on ancient Hindu philosophy, namely the Bhagavad-geetha (popularly known as the Bhagavad-Gita), and attempts to correlate certain successful strategic decisions and guidelines made in the past – with the modern day human activity management by expounding the similarities in both situations. Such profound knowledge of the ‘Geetha may not necessarily be restricted solely to religious grounds, but also applied as insights to the modern-day human interaction, perception and behavioral transactions to not only achieve success but primarily to eliminate personal differences and conflicts.

Standard single-stage tooth-to-pin-contact Cycloidal drives deliver various benefits such as high-ratio speed reduction, highly efficient torque delivery, compact physical structure etc. They lack torsional rigidity on their own because of inherent “lost-motion” and “backlash”, and hence inappropriate for precision-motion mechanical systems. However from dynamics point of view, this is beneficial for non-precision-motion systems, as it reduces the drive-train's shock factor. Currently there are no design standards for Cycloidal drives owing to their complicated component stiffness behaviour, increased tooth-load-sharing at overloads etc., which further obscures the analytical estimation of torsional rigidity of a given configuration. This paper presents a novel method comprising both analytical and numerical techniques for the effective determination of the elastic torsional compliance of single-stage Cycloidal drives based on static experimental results conducted on a commercially available gear-drive. We establish a unique key parameter −ηOP, ‘torque transfer efficiency’, of output-shaft-pins from mechanism-kinematics to be included in the system's dynamic model. Applying the techniques and outcomes presented here in a lumped mass/inertia dynamic model yielded agreeable natural frequency of torsional oscillations in comparison to experimental results obtained under the same loading conditions. This can lead to dynamically optimised designs and hence their standardisation.

Cycloidal drives are widely used in today's industries for drives where large reduction ratios are required. Drive-train dynamics plays an important role in their design. This paper presents a new methodology for assessing damping characteristics of Cycloidal drives and compares the natural frequencies obtained from experiments and theoretical/numerical calculations using Fast-Fourier-Transforms.

At present, for mechanical power transmission, Cycloidal drives are most preferred - for compact, high transmission ratio speed reduction, especially for robot joints and manipulator applications. Research on drive-train dynamics of Cycloidal drives is not well-established. This paper presents a testing rig for Cycloidal drives, which would produce data for development of mathematical models and investigation of drive-train dynamics, further aiding in optimising its design.