A Simulation Technique for the Improvement of Robot Calibration

Industrial robots may not be off-line programmable, unless their accuracy is improved by a suitable calibration procedure. However, proper calibration is a time-consuming and expensive procedure due to the highly accurate measurement equipment required and due to the significant amount of data that must be collected. These considerations prevent wider application of currently available calibration methods to robots in industrial environment. To provide the necessary tools for the optimization of the calibration process, in this paper, a computer simulation of the robot calibration and a systematic method for the evaluation of this calibration are developed. Simulated experiments are conducted to demonstrate the operation of the proposed method. Analysis of the data obtained in these experiments shows the capability of the simulation for comparison of alternative calibration procedures/set-ups and for prediction of the expected accuracy of the robot after an actual calibration is performed.