Robot Calibration for Cooperative Process under Typical Installation

A method with easy operation procedure and simple calibration condition is presented in this paper to solve thebase frame calibration problem for cooperative robots. It is carried out through constructing a series of handclaspconfigurations and recording coordinates of the contact points, respectively, in base frame of each robot. Then the rotationmatrix and translation matrix between base frame of cooperative robots can be calculated which is just the calibrationresult for cooperative robots. Based on typical installation mode for industrial robot, the floor mounted, wall mountedand ceiling mounted, constraints between base frames of these robots are further explored. These constraints areused to improve the calibration results for base frame calibration problem. In order to validate the correctness andeffectiveness of our method, experiments on two industrial robots (Motoman VA1400 and HP20) are carried out at theend of the paper. The calibration errors are less than 8 mm in most cases, which satisfies the requirement of positioningaccuracy for most industrial process, such as arc welding, transporting, and cutting. These experiment results assert thecorrectness of our method which can be used effectively to solve the base frame calibration problem for cooperativerobots in manufacturing process