Brief Overview of Long Reach Manipulators for Remote Maintenance in Fusion Reactors

In this work we briefly review some of the current available solutions of long reach manipulators that have been or are serving as robotic equipment for remote maintenance in fusion reactors. These robotic equipment are long reach since they are intended to access inside the fusion reactors through small–scaled access ports and are designed to remotely install/replace in-vessel mechanical components within the reactors. We start the work by analysing the design criteria commonly used and the most interesting concepts from the authors’ perspective, where we found a general scheme that could be adopted for the most cases when we study this kind of robots. Finally we present a discussion and draw our conclusions.