An Easily Manipulated Mechanical Arm (EMMA) was designed to facilitate all mining and closure operations for an environmental management project. The EMMA is a 52.5 ft long, 30" diameter, cylindrical hyper-redundant serpentine style manipulator. It consists of five discrete stages and is capable of accessing the complete task envelope within the silo. The wrist at the end of the manipulator provides local dexterity for the gripper end effector system and arm deployed sluicing subsystem. It is also capable of handling other tooling provided for use in silo waste retrieval activities. The EMMA manipulator system is housed and deployed from a silo bridge supported tower. The deployment tower is 90 ft tall and 12 ft in diameter. Through the silo bridge and the tower, the EMMA manipulator can move between the two silos. Users can operate the EMMA from both local and remote operation stations, providing desired redundant human machine interfaces. This paper describes the unique design of the EMMA manipulator and its deployment tower. It will discuss the associated simulation modeling, finite element analysis, and risk analysis.
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