The haptic slave robot that helps keep JET online

At the Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire, scientists have been maintaining the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor with the help of a robotic system called Mascot

“Mascot is a master/slave telerobotic manipulation system,” said Ronan Kelly, software engineer at RACE (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments).

“That essentially means you have two big arms in a control room, you’ve got two robot arms on the end of a robot inside the torus, and the two correspond directly. So as the operator moves the master arms, he gets full feedback to everything the slave arms are doing.”

Manoeuvres carried out by technicians in the control room are mirrored exactly by the robot in the torus — the doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber where plasma is observed — with haptic feedback allowing for pinpoint precision. Mascot effectively provides surrogate limbs for its controllers, who can’t set foot in the reactor for a number of reasons.