Design and Development of a Dexterous Master Glove for Nuclear Waste Telemanipulation

The rise of the nuclear industry in middle of the last century required the development of remotely controlled robotic solutions. Researches on radioactivity and its applications were initially performed in gloveboxes and hot cells with which operators can efficiently and safely access dangerous materials at distance using telemanipulators. Owing to the relatively limited variety of the objects used in such environments, and to the fact that they can usually be adapted for remote manipulation, it was possible to efficiently grasp them using purely mechanical or robotic 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) master-slave systems equipped with bi-digital grippers on the slave side and simple handles on the master side. Such solutions, which were perfectly adapted for handling a limited quantity and variety of radioactive material, are however no more sufficient when processing huge quantities of nuclear waste accumulated over time and/or produced at the occasion of dismantling operations occurring decades later at the end of the nuclear power plants lifecycle. The quantity and diversity of nuclear waste require more efficient and versatile systems. To answer this challenge and increase the operators’ productivity, we developed a novel dexterous master-slave system composed of a tridigital master glove and a remotely controlled three fingers dexterous gripper. This paper presents the design and development of this master hand device. We first introduce its design rationale, then we present its electromechanical design, with details on the kinematics, actuators, sensors and controller, and finally its integration in a master-slave system which is used to validate its ability to perform dexterous telemanipulation.