Automatic Calibration of a Robot Manipulator and Multi 3D Camera System
This work addresses the need for reliable calibration in human-robot collaboration systems, but it is incremental as it combines existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of calibrating robot manipulators with multiple 3D cameras by developing a framework that enables quick automatic calibration using a checkerboard grid, and they validated it through experiments analyzing calibration quality based on checkerboard positions.
With 3D sensing becoming cheaper, environment-aware and visually-guided robot arms capable of safely working in collaboration with humans will become common. However, a reliable calibration is needed, both for camera internal calibration, as well as Eye-to-Hand calibration, to make sure the whole system functions correctly. We present a framework, using a novel combination of well proven methods, allowing a quick automatic calibration for the integration of systems consisting of the robot and a varying number of 3D cameras by using a standard checkerboard calibration grid. Our approach allows a quick camera-to-robot recalibration after any changes to the setup, for example when cameras or robot have been repositioned. Modular design of the system ensures flexibility regarding a number of sensors used as well as different hardware choices. The framework has been proven to work by practical experiments to analyze the quality of the calibration versus the number of positions of the checkerboard used for each of the calibration procedures.