Kinematic Calibration of Robot Manipulator using RGB-D Camera

This paper proposed the robot manipulator kinematic calibration method based on a distance error model using an easy-to-use RGB-D(Depth) camera. The RGB-D camera attached to the robot end effector measures the checkerboard’s corner 3-D position in two different positions. The homogeneous transformation matrix having rotation matrix and translation vector between two different RGB-D camera positions is calculated from the acquired position data from the RGB-D camera. The distance error is measured by comparing the distance moved by the RGB-D camera from the derived homogeneous transformation matrix with the distance moved by the robot manipulator. Simulation and experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed robot manipulator kinematic calibration method with a 6-DOF robot manipulator.