Geometric Calibration Method of Robot Based on Measurement System Including Position and Orientation Parameters

Industrial robot which can acquire high accuracy has been widely used in automatic assembly.Usually,the geometric parameter of industrial robot should be inspected during manufacturing and application.High precision measurement equipment was utilized to acquire the position and orientation of robot’s end⁃effector,when calibrating the geometric parameter of robot.A kind of measurement system based on a draw⁃wire encoder was presented,since the current measurement equipment has some disadvantages,such as the cost and the requirements of working environment are high.According to this kind of measurement system,a sort of geometric calibration method of robot was presented including position and orientation parameters.The uncertain arc length of the cable length between robot end⁃effector and the measurement can be exactly acquired according to the position and orientation parameters.The pose⁃solving model of robot end⁃effector was associated with the kinematic model of robot,and robot’s geometric parameter can be computed by using the least⁃squares methods.Validate instance was conducted,the result showed that the optimal number of the calibration pose was 47 with little improvement in accuracy,even if increasing the number of calibration pose.Robot calibration experiment was performed and the results showed that the absolute accuracy of robot decreased from 4.32 mm to 0.87 mm after calibration,which improved the robot’s absolute accuracy effectively.

An Overview of Calibration Technology of Industrial Robots

With the continuous improvement of automation,industrial robots have become an indispensable part of automated production lines.They widely used in a number of industrial production activities,such as spraying,welding,handling,etc.,and have a great role in these sectors.Recently,the robotic technology is developing towards high precision,high intelligence.Robot calibration technology has a great significance to improve the accuracy of robot.However,it has much work to be done in the identification of robot parameters.The parameter identification work of existing serial and parallel robots is introduced.On the one hand,it summarizes the methods for parameter calibration and discusses their advantages and disadvantages.On the other hand,the application of parameter identification is introduced.This overview has a great reference value for robot manufacturers to choose proper identification method,points further research areas for researchers.Finally,this paper analyzes the existing problems in robot calibration,which may be worth researching in the future.

CALIBRATION OF A 6-DOF SPACE ROBOT USING GENETIC ALGORITHM

The kinematic error model of a 6-DOF space robot is deduced, and the cost function of kinematic parameter identification is built. With the aid of the genetic algorithm （GA） that has the powerful global adaptive probabilistic search ability, 24 parameters of the robot are identified through simulation, which makes the pose （position and orientation） accuracy of the robot a great improvement. In the process of the calibration, stochastic measurement noises are considered. Lastly, generalization of the identified kinematic parameters in the whole workspace of the robot is discussed. The simulation results show that calibrating the robot with GA is very stable and not sensitive to measurement noise. Moreover, even if the robot＇s kinematic parameters are relative, GA still has strong search ability to find the optimum solution.

Calibration of robotic drilling systems with a moving rail

Industrial robots are widely used in aircraft assembly systems such as robotic drilling systems. It is necessary to expand a robot＇s working range with a moving rail. A method for improving the position accuracy of an automated assembly system with an industrial robot mounted on a moving rail is proposed. A multi-station method is used to control the robot in this study. The robot only works at stations which are certain positions defined on the moving rail. The calibration of the robot system is composed by the calibration of the robot and the calibration of the stations.The calibration of the robot is based on error similarity and inverse distance weighted interpolation.The calibration of the stations is based on a magnetic strip and a magnetic sensor. Validation tests were performed in this study, which showed that the accuracy of the robot system gained significant improvement using the proposed method. The absolute position errors were reduced by about 85%to less than 0.3 mm compared with the maximum nearly 2 mm before calibration.