An active technique for piecewise calibration of robot manipulators

Robot calibration is essential to improve the positioning accuracy of robot manipulators. A mathematical (kinematic) model is used to describe the geometric structure of a robot manipulator. Robot calibration procedure involves calculating and improving the values of this model's parameters. The robot calibration technique presented in this paper uses a vision system, to calibrate the kinematic model. For an n-linked robot manipulator, the procedure calibrates one link at a time, starting with the n/sup th/ link by making small movements. The resulting equations are linear, consequently, the algorithms are simple.