Using Full Pose Measurement for Serial Robot Calibration

Abstract

To ensure smooth robot operations, parameters of its kinematic model and a registration transformation between robot base and world coordinate frame must be determined. Both tasks require data acquired by external sensors that can measure either 3D locations or full 6D poses. We show that use of full pose measurements leads to much smaller robot orientation errors when compared with the outcome of calibration and registration procedures based on 3D data only. Robot position errors are comparable for both types of data. The conclusion is based on extensive simulations of 7 degrees of freedom robot arm and different levels of pseudo-noise perturbing both positional and rotational components of pose.

Special Issue on Trends and Challenges in Robotic Applications

“…Using data from external sensors that measure 3D/6D locations is crucial to determining robots' kinematic parameters and the transformation between the world coordinate frame and the robot base. The study presented in [21] shows that full pose measurements result in significantly smaller robot orientation errors compared to using 3D data alone, while the robot position errors remain similar in both cases.…”