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?

As you will learn within this lesson, servo motor applications are most commonly used in closed loop systems where precise position control commonly found in industrial and commercial applications. Such as electric cylinder, slewing drives

Together with the recently RealPars published blog post, what is a Stepper Motor and How it Works, and this lesson, you will learn about motion control using different types of motors available, primarily stepper and servo motors.

In this lesson we will discuss what a servo motor is and how it works, so 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.