When industry and academia meet: the development of a robotized semiautomatic motorcycle transmission

Abstract

Abstract The development of the business - industry environment is unconceivable without the involvement of academia. On one hand, the universities can provide new perspectives and know-how which can be further translated into exquisite products and services for companies. On the other hand, the business environment can raise practical problems and challenges for academia, providing in the same time material support for finding solutions to these problems. This paper presents a successful partnership between business and academia materialized in the development of a robotized semiautomatic motorcycle transmission. Since the solutions existing on the market did not meet the specific requirements of our industrial partner, we were asked to design an innovative and cost effective clutch and gearbox mechanism. The paper presents all the stages passed from establishing specific objectives and tasks for each member of the project’s team, the specific steps followed in order to develop the clutch operation mechanism and the gear mechanism, the obstacles and failures encountered during the design process and the testing procedures, the optimizations implemented, up to the final solution. The advantages of such industry-academia projects are discussed and possible obstacles that can hinder this kind of collaboration are addressed.