Fault tolerant design of a Servo Manipulator System for Hot Cell Operation

핫셀용 서보 매니퓰레이터 시스템의 내고장 설계

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 the 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 weakened with radiation, fault tolerant mechanisms have to be considered. For fault tolerance of the servo manipulator system, hardware and software redundancy has been considered. In the 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 axes to recover the end effector's motion in spite of one motor's failure.