Servo motor
Encyclopedia
A servomotor is a motor which forms part of a servomechanism
. The servomotor is paired with some type of encoder
to provide position/speed feedback. A stepper motor
is one type of servomotor. A stepper motor is actually built to move angular positions based upon each possible step around the entire rotation, and may include micro-steps with a resolution such as 256 micro-steps per step of the stepper motor. A servomechanism may or may not use a servomotor. For example, a household furnace controlled by a thermostat is a servomechanism, because of the feedback and resulting error signal, yet there is no motor being controlled directly by the servomechanism.
Servomechanism
thumb|right|200px|Industrial servomotorThe grey/green cylinder is the [[Brush |brush-type]] [[DC motor]]. The black section at the bottom contains the [[Epicyclic gearing|planetary]] [[Reduction drive|reduction gear]], and the black object on top of the motor is the optical [[rotary encoder]] for...
. The servomotor is paired with some type of encoder
Encoder
An encoder is a device, circuit, transducer, software program, algorithm or person that converts information from one format or code to another, for the purposes of standardization, speed, secrecy, security, or saving space by shrinking size.-Media:...
to provide position/speed feedback. A stepper motor
Stepper motor
A stepper motor is a brushless, electric motor that can divide a full rotation into a large number of steps. The motor's position can be controlled precisely without any feedback mechanism , as long as the motor is carefully sized to the application...
is one type of servomotor. A stepper motor is actually built to move angular positions based upon each possible step around the entire rotation, and may include micro-steps with a resolution such as 256 micro-steps per step of the stepper motor. A servomechanism may or may not use a servomotor. For example, a household furnace controlled by a thermostat is a servomechanism, because of the feedback and resulting error signal, yet there is no motor being controlled directly by the servomechanism.