Hardware

Encoder

Encoder is a sensor that measures the angular or linear position of a mechanism, most commonly a rotary device on a motor shaft or joint using optical, magnetic, or capacitive sensing. Incremental encoders emit quadrature pulses counted relative to a reference, while absolute encoders report position uniquely on power-up. Joint encoders provide the proprioceptive feedback for servo control, and the term also names the input-compressing half of encoder-decoder neural architectures.

Why it matters for physical AI

Every joint-level control loop and every proprioceptive observation fed to a learned policy originates in encoder readings, making their resolution and reliability foundational to both classical control and policy learning.