Servo Motors for Robots

Servo motor is DC motor with built in gearing and feedback control loop circuitry. Servo motors are commonly using to build robot, RC plane and RC boat builders. Mostly the servo motors can rotate about 90 to 180 degrees. Even some of them can also rotate to full 360 degrees. But servo motors can not continually rotate.

Because of the capability of the servo motors it is ideally able to build robots arm and legs, rack and pinion steering. Since servos are fully self contained, the velocity and angle control loops are very easy to implement, while prices remain very affordable.

The example of simple servo motors is commonly use in radio, tape recorder etc. If you take a normal DC that usually installed at Radio Shack it has one coil with 2 wires. If you connect it to the battery then the motor will spin. If you reverse the polarity then the motor will reverse the direction. Attach the motor to the wheel of robots you will see the robot starts to move.

In a DC motor, the speed and current draw is an affected by the load. For applications that the exact position of the motor must be known, a feedback device like an encoder must be used.

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