Singular point analysis during rail deployment into vacuum vessel for ITER blanket maintenance

Kakudate, Satoshi; Shibanuma, Kiyoshi

Remote maintenance of the ITER blanket composed of about 400 modules in the vessel is required by a maintenance robot due to high radiation of 500Gy/h in the vessel. A concept of rail-mounted vehicle manipulator system has been developed to apply to the maintenance of the ITER blanket. The most critical issue of the vehicle manipulator system is the feasibility of the deployment of the articulated rail composed of eight rail links into the donut-shaped vessel without any driving mechanism in the rail. To solve this issue, a new driving mechanism and procedure for the rail deployment has been proposed, taking account of a repeated operation of the multi-rail links deployed in the same kinematical manner. The new driving mechanism, which is deferent from those of a usual articulated arm equipped with actuator in the every joint for movement, is composed of three mechanisms. To assess the feasibility of the kinematics of the articulated rail for rail deployment, a kinematical model composed of three rail links related to a cycle of the repeated operation for rail deployment was considered. The determinant det J of the Jacobian matrix J was solved so as to estimate the existence of a singular point of the transformation during rail deployment. As a result, it is found that there is a singular point due to det J =0. To avoid the singular point of the rail links, a new location of the second driving mechanism and the related rail deployment procedure are proposed. As a result of the rail deployment test based on the new proposal using a full-scale vehicle manipulator system, the respective rail links have been successfully deployed within 6 h less than the target of 8 h in the same manner of the repeated operation under a synchronized cooperation among the three driving mechanisms. It is therefore concluded that the feasibility of the rail deployment of the articulated rail composed of simple structures without any driving mechanism has been demonstrated.