Telemanipulation - a special activity in remotely controlled operations

Work to be done in areas hostile to humans needs special and careful preparation. If short-term entry is possible, groups of men can be trained to do the necessary work. If not, special devices have to be designed, built, and tested on mockups before the real work can be executed. Based on experience gained from maintenance in car production and test programs for a reprocessing facility, it was decided to train a special group of men to do remotely controlled work in hostile areas without endangering them and to use their personal experience as the basis for future work. This is the old-fashioned way of all professions. Some needs to be able to do that remotely controlled work with normally existing operational means and combinations of them like cranes, mechanical and electromechanical master slave manipulators (MMSMs and EMSMs), saws, files, hammer, tig-welding equipment, etc., in air as well as underwater. This paper discusses use of a remote operator manipulator (ROM), remote operator welder (ROW), a test of underwater work, and the repair of two activated jets pumps of a boiling water reactor BWR with a fueling machine, reactor crane, EMSM, and conventional tools