A Novel Camera-to-Robot Calibration Method for Vision-Based Floor Measurements
This addresses a specific calibration challenge for mobile robots in vision-based floor measurement tasks, representing an incremental improvement in robotics.
The paper tackles the problem of calibrating cameras on mobile robots for ground-observing measurements by proposing a novel hand-eye calibration method that integrates laser-tracker 3D metrology and camera-based 2D imaging, achieving sub-millimeter repeatability in experiments.
A novel hand-eye calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots is proposed. While cameras on mobile robots are com- mon, they are rarely used for ground-observing measurement tasks. Laser trackers are increasingly used in robotics for precise localization. A referencing plate is designed to combine the two measurement modalities of laser-tracker 3D metrology and camera- based 2D imaging. It incorporates reflector nests for pose acquisition using a laser tracker and a camera calibration target that is observed by the robot-mounted camera. The procedure comprises estimating the plate pose, the plate-camera pose, and the robot pose, followed by computing the robot-camera transformation. Experiments indicate sub-millimeter repeatability.