Development of design system for in-vessel manipulator of fusion reactor

Parameters such as the scope of movement and the maximum outreach have been used as the performance index for the design of manipulators so far. Recently many computer aided design systems have been developed to carry out studies of movements, postures and interference problems and analyses of dynamic loads and so on. But most of the above mentioned design approaches are based on experiences and know-hows of designers and do not use the quantitative indexes. On the other hand, some quantitative measures of manipulating ability of manipulators have been proposed recently. In this paper, we have developed a design system for arm mechanisms adopting the measure of manipulatability as the quantitative measures of manipulating ability of robot arms, which is useful to evaluate the manipulation performance of in-vessel manipulators for fusion reactors. The present design system has been applied to design the in-vessel manipulator for the Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER) to confirm the effectivity, and is useful to design arm mechanisms for realization of optimum manipulation performance in other fields. (author)