Evaluation of Kinematic and Compliance Calibration of Serial Articulated Industrial Manipulators

Abstract

As long as industrial robots are programmed by teach programming, their positioning accuracy is unimportant. With a wider implementation of offline programming and new applications such as machining, ensuring a higher positioning accuracy of industrial robots over the entire working space has become very important. In this paper, we first review the measurement schemes of end effector poses. We then outline kinematic models of serial articulated industrial manipulators to quantify the positioning accuracy with a focus on the extension of the classical Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) models to include rotary axis error motions. Subsequently, we expand the discussion on kinematic models to compliant robot models. The review highlights compliance models that are applied to calculate the elastic deformation produced by forces, namely gravity and external loads. Model-based numerical compensation plays an important role in machine tool control. This paper aims to present state-of-the-art technical issues and future research directions for the implementation of model-based numerical compensation schemes for industrial robots.