Improving the absolute positioning accuracy of robot manipulators

Abstract The absolute positioning accuracy of robot manipulator can be increased substantially by updating the nominal link parameters in the control software. This paper presents a general method to estimate the link parameter errors for any serial link manipulator (i.e., n links, and any combination of revolute and prismatic joints). The parameters are estimated through a linear kinematic model which relates the link bias errors to the end‐effector positioning error. Only end‐effector measurements are required instead of individual link measurements to implement this method.