In order to reach commercially-relevant availability, future fusion power plants must minimise the duration of maintenance shutdowns. However, as radiation levels increase, so too will the number of maintenance tasks that must be performed without human access. To meet these conflicting constraints, remote maintenance systems must therefore significantly increase their capabilities, performing tasks faster and in parallel. Unfortunately, the current teleoperation-based maintenance approach is inherently limited in these regards. Automation emerges as a potential solution, having demonstrated dramatic productivity gains in manufacturing across the world. The European DEMO project has begun to explore the feasibility of automated maintenance as a route to meeting the challenging availability targets. To this end, the Automated Inspection and Maintenance Test Unit (AIM-TU) has been designed and constructed, providing a highly versatile test platform able to adapt to evolving R&D programmes. It consists of a modular robot cell equipped with two robot arms mounted on linear rails, interchangeable end-of-arm-tooling, a variety of vision sensors and a fully integrated safety system. The hardware is supported by a modular software architecture, which permits different control input modes and provides a digital twin simulation of the cell for virtual verification and validation of control algorithms. This paper provides an overview of the system’s capabilities and reports on the first automated maintenance feasibility tests performed on the cell: automatic replacement of JET reactor tiles and automatic contactless inspection of tile anomalies.

为了达到与商业相关的可用性，未来的聚变电站必须最大限度地减少维护停机的时间。但是，随着辐射水平的提高，必须在无人操作的情况下执行的维护任务数量也会增加。为了满足这些冲突的约束，因此远程维护系统必须显着提高其功能，从而更快且并行地执行任务。不幸的是，当前基于远程操作的维护方法固有地在这些方面受到限制。自动化已成为一种潜在的解决方案，在世界范围内的制造业中均已证明其生产率得到了显着提高。欧洲的DEMO项目已开始探索自动维护的可行性，以此作为实现具有挑战性的可用性目标的途径。为此，设计并建造了自动检查和维护测试单元（AIM-TU），它提供了一个高度通用的测试平台，能够适应不断发展的R＆D计划。它由一个模块化机器人单元组成，该单元配有两个安装在线性导轨上的机器人手臂，可互换的手臂末端工具，各种视觉传感器和一个完全集成的安全系统。硬件由模块化软件体系结构支持，该软件体系结构允许使用不同的控制输入模式，并提供单元的数字孪生仿真，以进行虚拟验证和控制算法的验证。本文概述了系统的功能，并报告了在电池上进行的首次自动维护可行性测试：JET反应堆砖的自动更换和砖异常的自动非接触式检查。