Methods for Simultaneous Robot-World-Hand–Eye Calibration: A Comparative Study

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two novel methods for robot-world-hand–eye calibration and provide a comparative analysis against six state-of-the-art methods. We examine the calibration problem from two alternative geometrical interpretations, called 'hand–eye' and 'robot-world-hand–eye', respectively. The study analyses the effects of specifying the objective function as pose error or reprojection error minimization problem. We provide three real and three simulated datasets with rendered images as part of the study. In addition, we propose a robotic arm error modeling approach to be used along with the simulated datasets for generating a realistic response. The tests on simulated data are performed in both ideal cases and with pseudo-realistic robotic arm pose and visual noise. Our methods show significant improvement and robustness on many metrics in various scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Solpen: An Accurate 6-DOF Positioning Tool for Vision-Guided Robotics

“…The literature regarding vision-robot calibration can be quite profound and has been extensively worked over the years since the 80s-90s. Well-known work includes [14][15][16][17] and some recent reviews worth mentioning [18,19]. However, we do not aim to resolve this problem in this work but instead refer readers to the comprehensive research in this field.…”

An overview of hand-eye calibration

“…Ali [72] used a unit quaternion to represent the rotation matrix. He established the objective function (35) of the reprojection error of 3D points from pose i to pose j by transforming Eq.…”

“…Therefore, the relative error is often used to evaluate the results of robot hand-eye calibration. The following methods can be used to measure the error of the estimated value: average rotation error [72], average translation error, reprojection root mean square error, and 3D reconstruction accuracy error. The first error is the average rotation error (49).…”

Robust vision using retro reflective markers for remote handling in ITER

“…For this, an estimation of the hand-eye transformation is required. A detailed survey of hand-eye calibration methods is presented in [19]. From the surveyed methods we have utilized here the method of Shah [20].…”