What is a servo motor and its applications?
Publish Time: 2018-06-27 Origin: Site
Have you ever thought about how a robotic vehicle commonly used in military application with bomb detention is controlled or how metal cutting and forming machines provide precise motion for milling, lathes and bending for metal fabrication or how an antenna positioning system control the precision in azimuth and elevation?
Servo motor applications are most commonly used in closed loop systems where precise position control commonly found in industrial and commercial applications.
Let’s first determine what a servo motor is and examine some unique features of the types of a servo motor and its application.
Servo Motor Basics
Let’s begin, with the servo motor basics. Servo motors are part of a closed-loop system and are comprised of several parts namely a control circuit, servo motor, shaft, potentiometer, drive gears, amplifier and either an encoder or resolver.
A servo motor is a self-contained electrical device, that rotate parts of a machine with high efficiency and with great precision.
The output shaft of this motor can be moved to a particular angle, position and velocity that a regular motor does not have.
The Servo Motor utilizes a regular motor and couples it with a sensor for positional feedback.
The controller is the most important part of the Servo Motor designed and used specifically for this purpose.
The servo motor is a closed-loop mechanism that incorporates positional feedback in order to control the rotational or linear speed and position.
The motor is controlled with an electric signal, either analog or digital, which determines the amount of movement which represents the final command position for the shaft.
A type of encoder serves as a sensor providing speed and position feedback. This circuitry is built right inside the motor housing which usually is fitted with gear system.
Servo Motor Applications
Servo Motor Applications are applied in many industrial and commercial systems and products such as with robotics where a servo motor is used at every “joint” of a robot to perform its precise angle of movement.
The camera auto focus uses a servo motor built into the camera that corrects precisely the position of lens to sharpen the out-of-focus images.
And with antenna positioning systems where servo motors are used for both the positioning of azimuth and elevation axis of antennas and telescopes such as those used by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.