Development of the armor tile replacement system for FER

Armor tiles attached to a first wall of the Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER) must be replaced several times by a remote replacement system since they are damaged due to plasma during reactor operation. Since positions of armor tiles are changed due to a thermal deformation and so on, the replacement system must be capable of adapting to the position changes. A remote control system has been developed to automatically replace armor tiles of first walls with a single manipulator arm for FER. The system is composed of a robot manipulator and an end-effector (a tile replacement hand), which has a tile gripper, a nut-runner to rotate fixing bolts of tiles and a vision sensor to measure positions of them. The system can replace the tiles by means of a visual feedback control using the vision sensor in case the tile positions have changed due to plant operations. Tests have proven that the remote control system is useful and practicable. (author)