Effectors

• Effectors, as the word suggests, effect things.
• They are things like arms, hands, feet, spray guns, automatic welding irons, and even lights.
• They're what robots use to modify the world.
• Part of that can be moving about (with legs or wheels).
• Many of these effectors use motors to move joints.
• A key issue with an effector is its degrees of freedom (DOF).
• This is the number of ways it can move. So, your elbow has one DOF, your shoulder has rotational freedom, and your finger (with three joints) has three DOF.
• It's, perhaps, surprisingly complex to get robots to work, because the real world is dynamic and stochastic.