High-precision Calibration of Camera and IMU on Manipulator for Bio-inspired Robotic System

Inspired by box jellyfish that has distributed and complementary perceptive system, we seek to equip manipulator with a camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to perceive ego motion and surrounding unstructured environment. Before robot perception, a reliable and high-precision calibration between camera, IMU and manipulator is a critical prerequisite. This paper introduces a novel calibration system. First, we seek to correlate the spatial relationship between the sensing units and manipulator in a joint framework. Second, the manipulator moving trajectory is elaborately designed in a spiral pattern that enables full excitations on yaw–pitch–roll rotations and x–y–z translations in a repeatable and consistent manner. The calibration has been evaluated on our collected visual inertial-manipulator dataset. The systematic comparisons and analysis indicate the consistency, precision and effectiveness of our proposed calibration method.