A vision-based fast base frame calibration method for coordinated mobile manipulators

The mobile manipulators (MMs) have been increasingly adopted for machining large and complex components. In order to ensure the machining efficiency and quality, the MMs usually need to cooperate with each other. However, due to the low motion accuracy of the mobile platform, the relative pose accuracy between the coordinated MMs are difficult to guarantee, so an effective calibration method is needed to on-line obtain the relative pose of the MMs. For this purpose, a vision-based fast base frame calibration method is proposed in this paper, which can quickly and accurately obtain the relative pose between the coordinated MMs. The method only needs to add a camera and a marker, and then a frame network of the calibration system can be generated by installing the marker at three different positions. Based on the Perspective-n-Points principle and the robot forward kinematics, the transformation matrix of the marker frame with respect to the camera frame and the robot base frame can be determined by simply obtaining the images of the marker at different positions and corresponding robot joint angles. Then, the relative pose between the base frames of coordinated MMs can be determined by the calibration equation established based on a frame closed chains. In addition, the calibration method is capable of real-time calculation by dividing the calibration process into off-line and on-line stages. Simulation and experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.