Fun Info: Section 1: ROBOTICS

As I promised, I will be posting some brief and precisely important information that every robotics enthusiast must and should be aware of. To understand this art ( i call this art rather than science as it brings out one's imagination and scope of view by means of creation of a device that can be put into some judicious use) one must be aware of what motors, actuators, sensors,printed circuit boards,breadboards, resistors, capacitors,timers,voltage convertors......etc. actually are.
I wont be confusing the reader with any more of these words because i believe in imparting information in a step by step and concise manner so that the budding enthusiast does not actually lose interest in this process of slow and gradual learning.

But as a learning prerequisite i would first like to ask the reader to clear the image of what a robot is...(many of us assume robots as biped walking machines..humanoids etc. which is not fully correct).
Here, we will be starting from the scratch and progressing as we move on.....

ok ...so lets begin....

ACTUATORS

Actuators are the muscles of a robot, the parts that move a robot.There are various types of actuators . We will, however restrict our discussion here to the most basic and most widespread type of actuators-The Electric Motors.

Though we have a wide variety of motors available for use , we mostly use three main types of motors in constructing a crude or a preliminary robot.

the DC motor,Servo motor and the Stepper motor.

The DC motor:

They are the most widely used type of motors and are the easiest to understand and handle.

many of you might have observed a motor in a toy car that rotates continuously in one direction.

A DC motor is rated in terms of voltage,current,rpm(rotations per minute) and torque(kg-cm).Typical DC motors are rated from about 6v to 12v, 500mA to 1000mA.

Torque is the maximum weight a motor can draw through a 1 cm pulley.There is no polarity(positive or negative terminal) for a DC motor.If we apply a voltage to its terminals ,it spins...if we interchange the terminals, it spins in the opposite direction.

The Servo motor:

These motors are basically DC motors that can run on very low values of current but can give a high torque output.

They generally operate at 4-6volts.

The Stepper motor:

As the name suggests ..these motors are not free to rotate randomly like DC motors.

Their rotation is a collection of discrete "steps' that are under command from a microcontroller.

They have several advantages over the DC motors at several places of use.. for instance ..if you want to move the arm of a humanoid through an angle of 60 degrees it will not be possible using the DC motor as we can not control it in the course of its cycle.

Here , we are rescued by the stepper motor that can make the turn possible according to a set of predefined commands.

for a further reading on these three types of motors ..i wold like the viewers to have a brief browsing session through wikipedia.

In the next post i will deal with the circuit part of a robot i.e. the electronics related to the basics of Robotics.

***i will be editting this post and adding information here itself..in this very post..
suggestions are duly welcome
diabolic.arnav@gmail.com***