Automatic Calibration of a Robot Manipulator and Multi 3D Camera System

With 3D sensing becoming cheaper, environment-aware robot arms capable of safely working in collaboration with humans will become common. However, a reliable calibration is needed, both for camera internal calibration, as well as Eye-to-Hand calibration, to make sure the whole system functions correctly. We present a framework, using a novel combination of well proven methods, allowing a quick automatic calibration of the system consisting of the robot and a varying number of 3D cameras by using a standard checkerboard calibration grid. It is based on a modular design for an easy adaptation after any hardware or algorithm changes. Our approach allows a quick camera-to-robot recalibration after any changes to the setup, for example when cameras or robot were repositioned. The framework has been proven to work by practical experiments to analyze the quality of the calibration versus the number of positions of the checkerboard used for each of the calibration procedures.