Dear all,
I would like to design and build an automatic robotic system which required minimum of controlling 16 servos at the same time, can any specialist advise some 'cheap' control system to me and roughly how much it cost...
The system should include:
1) Monitoring Software
2) > 16 Servos
3) PLC / Controller
Appreciate if your guys can help. 
Kevin Hi Kevin,
To design a robotic device that has >16 DOF (degrees of freedom) would be quite challenging & complex. Servo motors needs feedback from encoders to determine th position. You would need to look at high-end motion controllers if you need to control precise motion, torque, postion etc.
You can use a traditional PLC to program & generate the PWM control signals; however, if you need to implement feedback, you would need to calculate the trajectory of the motion profile & interface with quadrature encoders for the position. And this needs to be done in micro second loop times, otherwise the motion control would be very unstable. Also, if you need to achieve complex motion like a robot arm, you might need to coordinate & synchronise many motors each runing control loop rates of us or ms. Hence, you might need to go with PAC or PC-based systems.
You can search on the topic of PAC to find out more about it. You can also check out NI's website on motion control hardware/software.
http://www.ni.com/motion/ hope this helps, good luck!
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