Calibration method for articulated industrial robots

Robot calibration is technique used to increase sytem positioning accurancy. In our research, we have reviewed self-calibration techniques of articulated industrial robots and proposed an original method to reduce production and maintenance down times. The proposed technique is using an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to measure robot poses, plus ultrasonic triangulation sensors to increase processing speed and reduce computational power. Thanks to all of that, robot is more responsive, i.e. we have an improved speed, reliability and accuracy in determining the orientation of the manipulators. The advantages of this method in comprising with the vision based calibration, is that it does not need the complex steps, such as camera calibration, image capture, memory and corner detection. This makes the robot calibration procedure more autonomous in a dynamic manufacturing environment. The proposed technique was applied at Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DOF) robot and compared to existing calibration methods. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.