A new identification Jacobian for robotic hand/eye calibration

Hand/eye calibration is the process of identifying the unknown position and orientation of the camera frame with respect to the robot hand frame, when the camera is rigidly mounted on the robot hand. While computationally slightly more involved, one-stage iterative algorithms have two distinguished advantages over traditional two-stage linear approaches: 1) they are less sensitive to noise, and 2) they can handle cases in which the camera orientation information is not available. A more compact and lower dimensional identification Jacobian is derived. The Jacobian, which relates measurement residuals to pose error parameters of the unknown hand/eye transformation, is a crucial component of one-stage iterative algorithms. The derivation procedure for the new Jacobian is straightforward and simple, owing to an alternative mathematical formulation of the hand/eye calibration problem. Observability conditions of the pose error parameters in the unknown hand/eye transformation are also provided based on this identification Jacobian