A performance comparison of the full pose- and partial pose-based robot calibration for various types of robot manipulators

Abstract

Robot kinematic calibration used to be carried out with the partial pose measurements (position only) of dimension 3 in industry, while full pose measurements (orientation and position) of dimension 6 sometimes could be considered to improve the calibration performance. This paper investigates the effects of measurement dimensions on robot calibration accuracy. It compares the resulting robot accuracies in both partial pose and full pose cases after calibrating three structural types of robot manipulators such as a serial manipulator (Hyundai HA-06 robot), a single closed-chain manipulator (Hyundai HX-165 robot), and a multiple closed-chain manipulator (Hyundai HP-160 robot). These comparative studies show when the full-pose based calibration need to be considered and how much it contributes the improvement of robot accuracy to the different structural type of robot manipulators.