It’s easy for us to see how wonderful servo motors are. We work with them every day. In fact, anyone who works in printing, manufacturing, packaging, or any industry job knows just how incredible and amazing servo motors are. Without industrial servo motors, industrial automation wouldn’t be possible, and manufacturing would look a lot different than it does today (we would need a time machine to take us back two-hundred-some-odd years to get a sense of what manufacturing would actually look like).
However, if you don’t work with industrial servos and industrial machinery, it can be a bit more difficult to truly grasp just how great servos are. Even if you know some of the surprising places you can find servos, you might still have trouble comprehending the value of servo motors. So we’re going to put it into terms that can demonstrate just how awesome servos are.
Robots.
Robots, both fictional and real, use servo motors to carry out motion control. From the monolithic industrial robotics arms that build your cars to the herky-jerky shuffle of C-3PO, robots need servos in order to move.
So if you’ve been scratching your head trying to figure out why you should care about servo motors, here are 7 very good reasons why servo motors matter.
- da Vinci Survical System – This robotic surgical assistant has aided doctors in hundreds of thousands of surgeries. It’s approved by the FDA, and brings an unprecedented level of precision and reliability to medicine.
- Optimus Prime – Without servo motors, Optimus Prime wouldn’t be able to defend the earth from the Decepticons
- Atlas – Atlas is “the agile anthropomorphic” robot that makes every impossible robot you’ve seen in science fiction seem suddenly possible. While it uses hydraulic actuators, it also implements servo motors.
- Terminator aka T-800 – Sure, the Terminator started out as a bad guy, but without him who would save us from the T-1000?
- Roomba – Thanks to this autonomous little vacuum cleaner, it’s once again safe for lazy people to eat chips in the living room.
- C-3PO – This waddling, golden robot is a constant reminder that artificially intelligent robots can have great manners and won’t necessarily try to destroy mankind.
- Asimo – Asimo is another humanoid robot that looks like it climbed out of a sci-fi movie. The robot is capable of carrying out a number of helpful human actions with the aid of 34 different servo motors.