TJ1 - Hydraulic Remote Manipulator
Description
Tree trimming in the vicinity of live electrical distribution lines has proven to be dangerous for workers. In response to concerns of worker safety, ESI has developed the TJ1, a remote master-slave hydraulic manipulator, with the intent of relocating workers away from hazardous tasks. An assortment of hydraulic tools can be attached to the slave to enable its use in a variety of high risk tasks.
The slave is a 6 degree-of-freedom hydraulic arm, and the master is a 5 degree-of-freedom electric arm. The master is instrumented to provide the operator with torque feedback with respect to two axes of rotation. This allows the operator to feel the contact forces and moments in and about certain directions. Such capability can be extended to a complete six degrees of freedom. The communication between master and slave is via fibre-optic cable.