Static calibration of industrial manipulators: Design of an optical instrumentation and application to SCARA robots

This article presents a method for the static calibration of industrial robots based on optical measurements using a laser. Measured pose errors are used to estimate the geometric errors in the links. This allows the prediction of the pose error for every robot configuration, permitting the improvement of accuracy by means of slight variations of the joint motions. After a theoretical introduction on the methodology, it is applied to a SCARA robot analyzing the design of the set-up and the final precision that could be achieved. Preliminary experimental results are also presented. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.