Welcome to Oriental Motor's "Engineering Notes" Blog:

Robot adoption is increasing in many industries due to global efforts in reducing long term costs, maintaining quality, and freeing up time for humans to do "human" tasks.  For example, by using a robot to clean floors or restock shelves in a supermarket, human employees can spend more time helping or selling to their customers.  A company can either tap into this robotic trend by buying ready-made robots, or by making their own with less cost. 

If engineering resources are limited, selecting the right components can reduce the difficulty and time for building a robot.

In the market of electric motors, there are products designed for general purpose applications, and there are motors designed for specialized applications, such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) or autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).  While standard, general-purpose motors work for most applications such as factory automation, sometimes, it may help accelerate your design cycle by going with a motor system that already offers the features that you are planning to design into your machine.  In this post, we will summarize some of these features.

Stepper motors are popular for their ability to stop accurately as well as their ease of use.  Both the amount of rotation and the speed are controlled easily with the same digital square wave pulse signal.  Unlike servo motors, stepper motors do not need an encoder to operate.  Example applications of stepper motors are CNC machines, index tables, robotics, scanners, and more recently, 3D printers.