Evaluation of Robot Calibration Performance based on a Three Dimensional Small Displacement Measuring Sensor

Abstract

There have been many autonomous robot calibration methods which form closed loop structures through the various attached sensors and mechanical fixtures. Single point calibration among them has been used for on-site calibration due to its convenience of implementation. The robot can reach a single point with infinitely many configurations so that single point calibration algorithm can be set up and easily implemented relative to the other methods. However, it is not still easy to drive the robots' sharp edge to its corresponding edge of the fixture. This is error-prone process. In this paper, we propose a 3 dimensional small displacement measuring sensor and a robot calibration algorithm based on this sensor. This method relieves the difficulty of matching two edges in the single point calibration and improves the resulting robot accuracy. Simulated study is carried out on a Hyundai HA06 robot to show the effectiveness of the proposed method over the single point calibration. And also, the resulting robot accuracy is compared with that from 3D laser tracker based calibration to show the dependency of robot accuracy on range of the workspace where the measurement data are collected.