3D Hand-Eye Calibration for Collaborative Robot Arm: Look at Robot Base Once

Leihui Li, Lixuepiao Wan, Volker Krueger, Xuping Zhang

2025

Abstract

Hand-eye calibration is a common problem in the field of collaborative robotics, involving the determination of the transformation matrix between the visual sensor and the robot flange to enable vision-based robotic tasks. However, this process typically requires multiple movements of the robot arm and an external calibration object, making it both time-consuming and inconvenient, especially in scenarios where frequent recalibration is necessary. In this work, we extend our previous method which eliminates the need for external calibration objects such as a chessboard. We propose a generic dataset generation approach for point cloud registration, focusing on aligning the robot base point cloud with the scanned data. Furthermore, a more detailed simulation study is conducted involving several different collaborative robot arms, followed by real-world experiments in an industrial setting. Our improved method is simulated and evaluated using a total of 14 robotic arms from 9 different brands, including KUKA, Universal Robots, UFACTORY, and Franka Emika, all of which are widely used in the field of collaborative robotics. Physical experiments demonstrate that our extended approach achieves performance comparable to existing commercial hand-eye calibration solutions, while completing the entire calibration procedure in just a few seconds.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Li L., Wan L., Krueger V. and Zhang X. (2025). 3D Hand-Eye Calibration for Collaborative Robot Arm: Look at Robot Base Once. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-770-2, SciTePress, pages 333-341. DOI: 10.5220/0013738500003982

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco25,
author={Leihui Li and Lixuepiao Wan and Volker Krueger and Xuping Zhang},
title={3D Hand-Eye Calibration for Collaborative Robot Arm: Look at Robot Base Once},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO},
year={2025},
pages={333-341},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013738500003982},
isbn={978-989-758-770-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO
TI - 3D Hand-Eye Calibration for Collaborative Robot Arm: Look at Robot Base Once
SN - 978-989-758-770-2
AU - Li L.
AU - Wan L.
AU - Krueger V.
AU - Zhang X.
PY - 2025
SP - 333
EP - 341
DO - 10.5220/0013738500003982
PB - SciTePress