Visual servo simulation of EAST articulated maintenance arm robot

For the inspection and light-duty maintenance of the vacuum vessel in the EAST tokamak, a serial robot arm, called EAST articulated maintenance arm, is developed. Due to the 9-m-long cantilever arm, the large flexibility of the EAMA robot introduces a problem in the accurate positioning. This article presents an autonomous robot control to cope with the robot positioning problem, which is a visual servo approach in context of tile grasping for the EAMA robot. In the experiments, the proposed method was implemented in a simulation environment to position and track a target graphite tile with the EAMA robot. As a result, the proposed visual control scheme can successfully drive the EAMA robot to approach and track the target tile until the robot reaches the desired position. Furthermore, the functionality of the simulation software presented in this paper is proved to be suitable for the development of the robotic and computer vision application.