A self-calibration method for robotic measurement system

Robot calibration plays an increasingly important mle in manufacturing. For robot calibration on the manufacturing floor, it is desirable that the cal ibration technique be easy and convenient to implement. This paper presents a new self-calibration method to calibrate and compensate for robot system kinematic errors. Compared with the traditional calibration methods, this calibration method has several unique features. First. it is nor necessary to apply an external measurement system to measure the robot end-effector p osition for the purpose of kinematic identification since the robot measure ment system has a sensor as its integral part. Second, this self-calibratio n is based on distance measurement rather than absolute position measuremen t for kinematic identification: therefore the calibration of the transforma tion from the world coordinate system to the robot base coordinate system, known as base calibration, is not necessary. These features not only greatl y facilitate the robot system calibration, but also shorten the error propa gation chain. therefore, increase the accuracy of parameter estimation. An integrated calibration system is designed to validate the effectiveness of this calibration method. Experimental results show that after calibration t here is a significant improvement of robot accuracy over a typical robot wo rkspace.