Force control of remote maintenance robot for the ITER

This paper proposes a force control scheme for a remote maintenance robot for nuclear fusion reactors. In the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a remote maintenance system which can perform the assembly of heavy objects with high positional accuracy is required. For this kind of task, force control is much more preferable than position control. We applied force control to an experimental blanket-handling system and performed several experiments on the assembly of a dummy blanket. The experimental results illustrate the validity of the force control for the task.