Industrial Robot and External Axle Calibration Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

A novel calibrating approach is proposed to determine the transformation relationship between the robot tool coordinate and the external axle worktable coordinate. The whole approach is divided into three steps. Firstly, the geometric model of the system is established. After calibrating the transformation relationship between the robot wrist and the contact position sensor according to the geometric model, a robot measurement system is composed of the robot and the range sensor. Secondly, the detection target is moved according to the preset program, the data is obtained and sampled with the calibrated robot measurement system, the transformation relationship between the robot base coordinate and the external rotating axle and pitching axle coordinates is preliminarily calibrated. Finally, the fitness function is chosen and the key parameters are optimized by particle swarm optimization algorithm to improve the system precision. The effectiveness of the presented approach is demonstrated via some experiments.