A new pose measuring and kinematics calibrating method for manipulators

Calibration is an essential issue to use a robot to accomplish some tasks with high accuracy requirements. An important part of calibration process is measuring the actual pose of some parts of the robot. Many sensors have been used for measuring, for some of them, extra objects need installing on the robot, so it's possible to implement extra accuracy problems. While choosing coordinate measure machine as the measure equipment, a new pose measure method is proposed. The major advantage of this method is neither extra objects nor definite points are needed, so it's more feasible to realize the coordinate measure machine's strength. The planes for calibration can be directly machined on the end-effector, so the assembly errors are avoided completely. An experiment to calibrate a parallel robot's geometrical parameters is carried out and the results are provided.