Calibration of relative position between manipulator and work by point-to-face touching method

Abstract

This paper presents a new technique for simple, highly accurate calibration of relative position between a robot arm and a target work. This technique can shorten calibration time and reduce production cost. In this study, we adopted point-to-face touching for simple, highly accurate calibration. Point-to-face touching means to touch work surface with one point of an arm tip tool. Robot arms can get constraints of work position by difference between actual touching point and ideal one, and can calculate work position error with linear programming problem. Effectiveness of the calibration technique has been verified by experiments. By repeating experiments without changing environment and conditions, repeatability of the proposed calibration technique is verified by confirming dispersion of the calibration results. Precision is also verified by trying of robot arm to examine peg-in-hole task without force control. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.