Development of an End-effector for Coupled Tendon-driven Manipulator for On-site Elemental Analysis in Decommissioning Work

One of the purposes of exploration and inspection of nuclear facilities is to understand the distribution of nuclear materials in reactor. This is because if the elements can be characterized on-site, decommissioning can be carried out efficiently. Therefore, it is necessary to attach a sensor to the tip of the long manipulator to perform on-site elemental analysis. However, the positioning accuracy of the long-reach manipulator is not sufficient due to structural deformation and joint control errors. Therefore, we propose an end-effector that can passively adapt orientation of the measurement device to the subject, and actively generates linear motion to the subject. The end-effector consists of a linear mechanism and a follower mechanism. The end-effector is mounted on a coupled tendon-driven manipulator and operated for an experiment. As a result, we succeeded in performing elemental analysis by LIBS probe even though there was an error in the target posture.