Fault Tolerance Design for Servo Manipulator System Operating in a Hot Cell

In this paper, fault tolerant mechanisms are presented for a servo manipulator system designed to operate in a hot cell. A hot cell is a sealed and shielded room to handle radioactive materials, and it is dangerous for people to work in the hot cell. So, remote operations are necessary to handle radioactive materials in the hot cell. KAERI has developed a servo manipulator system to perform such remote operations. However, since electric components such as servo motors are weak to radiations, fault tolerant mechanisms have to be considered. For fault tolerance of the servo manipulator system, hardware and software redundancy have been considered. In case of hardware, radioactive resistant electric components such as cables and connectors have been adopted and motors driving a transport have been duplicated. In case of software, a reconfiguration algorithm accommodating one motor's failure has been developed. The algorithm uses redundant axis to recover the end effector's motion in spite of one motor's failure.