Kinematic calibration for collaborative robots on a mobile platform using motion capture system

For modern robotic applications that go beyond the typical industrial environment, absolute accuracy is one of the key properties that make this possible. There are several approaches in the literature to improve robot accuracy for a typical industrial robot mounted on a fixed frame. In contrast, there is no method to improve robot accuracy when the robot is mounted on a mobile base, which is typical for collaborative robots. Therefore, in this work, we proposed and analyzed two approaches to improve the absolute accuracy of the robot mounted on a mobile platform using an optical measurement system. The first approach is based on geometric operations used to calculate the rotation axes of each joint. This approach identifies all rotational axes, which allows the calculation of the Denavit–Hartenberg (DH) parameters and thus the complete kinematic model, including the position and orientation errors of the robot end-effector and the robot base. The second approach to parameter estimation is based on optimization using a set of joint positions and end-effector poses to find the optimal DH parameters. Since the robot is mounted on a mobile base that is not fixed, an optical measurement system was used to dynamically and simultaneously measure the position of the robot base and the end-effector. The performance of the two proposed methods was analyzed and validated on a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda robot mounted on a mobile platform PAL Tiago-base. The results show a significant improvement in absolute accuracy for both proposed approaches. By using the proposed approach with the optical measurement system, we can easily automate the estimation of robot kinematic parameters with the aim of improving absolute accuracy, especially in applications that require high positioning accuracy.