Intelligent manipulator for remote maintenance and inspection

An intelligent dual-arm manipulator has been developed which can autonomously adapt to various tasks and environments in future plants. The manipulator makes task plans by searching for a collision-free path to the manipulated objects, and can optimize its arm structure by changing joints according to the plans. The typical planning time for an optimal collision-free path, utilizing a heuristic graph-search algorithm, was about one-tenth of that by a conventional method. The manipulator could autonomously reconstruct its left arm joints in five minutes by using its right arm