Professional and hobbyist roboticists alike are snapping up Robotis Dynamixel Servos. These "smart" servos serve an important niche between $30 hobby servos and super-expensive harmonic drive servos. They sport torques ranging from 12 kg·cm to 106 kg·cm, and even more when doubled-up. Most of my experience is with the RX-28 and RX-64 variants, which have 300° swing, 10-bit position sensing resolution, (roughly) 8-bit position control, force/torque sensing, available compliance mode, and can daisy-chain more than 250 servos. At Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, we use dozens of these servos. I recently invested a decent amount of time overhauling our open-source (Python) control software, adding (among other things) thread-safe operation and ROS (Robot Operating System) compatibility. In this post, I'll do a brief overview of the Robotis Dynamixel offerings, look at a number of impressive applications where they are utilized, share pictures of a servo's disassembly, and give a brief tutorial using the new (awesome) open-source software libraries.
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