Hand-eye calibration using dual quaternions

To relate measurements made by a sensor mounted on a mechanical link to the robot's coordinate frame, we must first estimate the transformation betwee n these two frames. Many algorithms have been proposed for this so-called h and-eye calibration, but they do not treat the relative position and orient ation in a unified way In this paper we introduce the use of dual quaternio ns, which are the algebraic counterpart of screws. Then we show how a line transformation can be written with the dual-quaternion product. We algebrai cally prove that if we consider the camera and motor transformations as scr ews, then only the line coefficients of the screw axes are relevant regardi ng the hand-eye calibration. The dual-quaternion parameterization facilitat es a new simultaneous solution for the hand-eye rotation and translation us ing the singular value decomposition. Real-world performance is assessed di rectly in the application of hand-eye information for stereo reconstruction , as well as in the positioning of cameras. Both real and synthetic experim ents show the superiority of the approach over two other proposed methods.