A fully automatic hand-eye calibration system

Abstract

To retrieve the 3D coordinates of an object in the robot workspace is a fundamental capability for industrial and service applications. This can be achieved by means of a camera mounted on the robot end-effector only if the hand- eye transformation is known. The standard calibration process requires to view a calibration pattern, e.g. a checkerboard, from several different perspectives. This work extends the standard approach performing calibration pattern localization and hand- eye calibration in a fully automatic way. A two phase procedure has been developed and tested in both simulated and real scenarios, demonstrating that the automatic calibration reaches the same performance level of a standard procedure, while avoiding any human intervention. As a final contribution, the source code for an automatic and robust calibration is released.