A compensation method for the eccentricity and inclination errors of spiral bevel gear based on improved ICP algorithm

Due to the manufacturing and assembly errors of the spiral bevel gear, the deviations between the measured tooth surface and its theoretical tooth surface will affect the measurement results of the tooth surface. After analyzing the tooth surface deviation of spiral bevel gear, this paper provided a compensation method to compensate the eccentricity and inclination errors by the registration of the theoretical and measured tooth surface. An improved iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm for the registration of the tooth surface was provided. The distance between the point in measured tooth surface and the nearest point in theoretical tooth surface is used to replace the minimum Euclidean distance, and the damping Gauss-Newton method is used to solve the geometric transformation matrix. Simulation experiments were carried out to verify the proposed compensation method. The compensation effect is over 93% for the concave tooth surface and over 89% for the convex tooth surface of the spiral bevel gear. The results also show that the improved ICP algorithm could compensate the eccentricity and inclination errors of the spiral bevel gear more precisely than the basic ICP algorithm.