Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

A bridge transported servo manipulator (BTSM) system for the advanced spent fuel conditioning process (ACP) has been developed to overcome the limitation of access, which is a drawback of mechanical master-slave manipulators (MSM) for the equipment maintenance. The servo manipulator is composed of a slave manipulator attached to the telescoping tubesets equipped with the overhead bridge installed at a hot cell and a master manipulator installed at an out-of-hot cell. Each manipulator has 7 degrees-of-freedom (DOF): a body rotation, an upper-arm tilt, a lower-arm tilt, a lower-arm rotation, a wrist pan & tilt, and a grasp motion. A wire-driven mechanism for a lower-arm rotation, a wrist pan and tilt, and a grasp motion of the manipulator has been adopted to increase the handling capacity compared to the manipulator weight and decrease the friction. The main disadvantage of the wire-driven mechanism is that if one link is in motion, other links can be affected. In this paper, the transmission characteristics among the wire-driven links have been formulated to overcome this drawback. The unexpected behaviors are confirmed by analyses of transmission characteristics as well as experiments. Also, the experimental results show that the unexpected behaviors are greatly decreased by the proposed compensation equations.

Keywords

ACP,MSM,Bridge transported,Servo manipulator,Wire-driven,Equipment maintenance