Kinematics Analysis of Hyper-Redundant Manipulator Used for Inspection of First Wall of Tokamak

In order to accomplish large-space inspection of the first wall of Tokamak with high accuracy, a 13-DOF hyper-redundant manipulator having a macro-micro structure was designed. To overcome the contradiction between rapidity and precision of kinematics computation, a kinematics algorithm was proposed by taking into account the task environment structure. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the planar multi-links configuration of macro manipulator and the circular motion trajectory to reduce the complexity of inverse kinematics. A perturbation method was introduced to resolve the computation of inverse kinematics when the micro manipulator was in singularity configurations, and energy optimized strategy was chosen to determine the inverse solutions for micro manipulation which might have lots of or even infinite solutions for some configurations. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was validated through simulation.