Ergonomic Analysis of a Telemanipulation Technique for a Pyroprocess Demonstration Facility

Teleoperation is the performance of a task or action from a distance. Although, in this sense, teleoperation can be applied to any operation performed from a distance, the term is most commonly associated with robotics and mobile robots and indicates the operation of such machines from a place far from the location of the machine [1]. Several factors are involved in a teleoperated robotic system, including human-machine interaction, bilateral control strategy, signal transmission, and virtual reality and augmented reality (VR and AR). The areas in which such systems are applied are extremely diverse, and teleoperation promises to be useful in the efficient accomplishment of the pertinent tasks. Many types of remote manipulators have been developed with the purpose of executing the handling tasks in a cell, and teleoperation systems that use such manipulators are known to be reliable and to reduce hazardous exposure, for example, to radiation [2-3]. The technology is considered as a solution to some dangerous tasks in the nuclear industry, for example, the dismantling of outworn equipment and management of a nuclear reactor core [4]. In this study, a remote handling manipulator was used to operate and manage equipment installed in an argon cell facility for a pyroprocess demonstration. This type of manipulator is generally composed of a master-slave system with a simple mechanical structure that enhances operability. The particular remote manipulator systems examined in this study are a mechanical master-slave system (MSM) developed by HWM Ltd. in Germany, and a bridge-transported dual arm servo manipulator (BDSM) system developed by KAERI in Korea [5–6]. The developed remote handling system uses servo-driven actuators and travels over the entire cell area using a bridge transport system. However, despite the dexterous manipulators and redundant monitoring system, many operators, including professionals, experience difficulty operating this type of remote handling system. This is because of the lack of a strategy for handling the installed camera system, and the difficulty of recognizing the gripper pose, which may fall outside the field of vision (FOV) of the system during the performance of a remote handling task. In this study, we considered the following four strategic issues of teleoperation: http://dx.doi.org/10.5516/NET.06.2014.026