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Actuator Design Primer

sajiv123.github.io · 2,788 words · saved by 1 readers

Actuators are getting recognition as the critical component of robotics hardware today, and while there are great resources covering what they are and what they are made of (see humanityslastmachine.com), something that is both difficult to learn and explain is how engineers design actuators for specific applications. My hope is that you can walk away from this post with a foundational understanding of the workflow of how actuator requirements are developed and how different physical properties (length of a robot limb, stiffness of the gearbox) affect the performance characteristics that roboticists actually care about. In future posts, I aim to answer deeper questions down to "how is battery voltage controlled by a microcontroller to make a 3-phase motor spin?" Note: There are tons of different types of actuators. This post most centrally covers the BLDC electric motor actuators you would find in modern robot arms and humanoids, but most concepts can be abstracted to other types. I wo

Actuators are getting recognition as the critical component of robotics hardware today, and while there are great resources covering what they are and what they are made of (see humanityslastmachine.com), something that is both difficult to learn and explain is how engineers design actuators for specific applications. My hope is that you can walk away from this post with a foundational understanding of the workflow of how actuator requirements are developed and how different physical properties (length of a robot limb, stiffness of the gearbox) affect the performance characteristics that…

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