A low cost hand-eye calibration method for arc welding robots

Hand-eye calibration is one of the most important and fundamental tasks in performing visual guided robot control tasks. Many techniques have been proposed that use various expensive equipment ranging from a three dimensional positioning device to a laser measurement device. The work presented in this paper aims at developing a low cost robot hand/eye calibration method that is accurate and robust enough to be used in a robotic arc welding system. The proposed calibration method allows the camera and object frames to be referenced directly to the robots base co-ordinate frame. Experimental results show that the developed method can be used to achieve a calibration accuracy of 1 mm (in the directions of interest, X and Y axes) that is acceptable for robotic welding applications.