Electromechanical means of automatically maintaining a desired state by sensing variations from that state, and then correcting those variations by using very small amounts of power to control much larger amounts of power
Device used to correct the performance of a mechanism automatically, by means of error-sensing feedback. The term properly applies only to systems in which the feedback and error-correction signals control mechanical position or velocity. Servomechanisms were first used in military and marine navigation equipment. Today they are used in automatic machine tools, satellite-tracking antennas, celestial-tracking systems on telescopes, automatic navigation systems, and antiaircraft-gun control systems. The design of servomechanisms is considered to be a branch of both robotics and cybernetics