Absolute robot calibration with a single telescoping ballbar

A novel 6D measurement system was recently proposed, comprising a single commercially available telescoping ballbar and two custom-made fixtures. One fixture is attached to the robot base and the other to the robot end-effector, and each having three magnetic cups. In each of 72 poses of the tool fixture, with respect to the base fixture, it is possible to measure six distances with the ballbar between the magnetic cups on the tool fixture and the magnetic cups on the base fixture, and thus calculate the pose with high accuracy. This paper is the first to present the successful use of this measurement system for absolute robot calibration. The robot calibrated is a Fanuc LR Mate 200iC six-axis industrial robot and the telescoping bar used is the QC20-W by Renishaw. The absolute position accuracy of the robot after calibration is validated with a Faro laser tracker in almost 10,000 robot configurations. Considering the validation data in only the front/up configurations, the mean absolute positioning error is improved from 0.873 mm to 0.479 mm. To allow a comparison, the robot is also calibrated using the laser tracker and the robot accuracy validated in the same 10,000 robot configurations.