Herkulex are the smart servos manufactured by Dongbu Robotics. Smart servos are far superior to RC servos in performance and quality. They make the ideal choice for making robots. Herkulex servos stand in between the common RC servos and the high end harmonic geared servo motors.

DRS-201

                   A smart servo has an inbuilt microcontroller unlike the RC servos, and we can communicate to the servo over RS232/TTL protocol. These servos has some built in registers which can be read/written. The values inside these registers define various operational parameters of the servo. The registers help us to get valuable information of the servo like position, speed, temperature, present load, tune PID values of the position control loop etc.

The only problem faced was the lack of good quality library in python or c++. So I set out to write one in python. It wasn’t difficult since the datasheet mentioned clearly the registers, addresses etc. The library is available here.