Efficient, Precise, and Convenient Calibration of Multi-camera Systems by Robot Automation

Future use cases for stationary robot manipulators envision shared human-robot workspaces. However, shared workspaces may contain a priori unknown obstacles (e.g. humans). Robots must take these obstacles into account when moving (e.g. through online path planning). To this end, current research suggests real-time workspace monitoring with a calibrated multi-camera system. State-of-art solutions to camera calibration exhibit flaws in the above scenario, including long calibration times, excessive reprojection errors, or extensive per-calibration efforts. In contrast, we contribute an approach to multi-camera calibration that is at once efficient, precise, and convenient: We perform fully-automated calibration of each camera with a robot-mounted calibration object. Subsequent multi-camera optimization equalizes reprojection error over all cameras. After initial setup, experiments attest our contribution minor reprojection errors in few minutes time at one button click. Overall, we thus enable frequent system (re-)calibration (e.g. when moving cameras).