Active calibration and its applications on micro-operating platform with multiple manipulators

The microscope has characteristics of a planar vision with small view field and small view depth. For micro operation systems with multiple manipulators, the handling of irregular objects may lead to a nonorthogonal microscopic system, which needs to focus on clear viewing interested features, and it may also hardly locate the exact position and posture of the robot arms. In view of these, this paper proposes an active calibration method to compute image Jacobian matrix, which maps from the relative motion of the manipulators to the image coordination changes in the microscopes. We also investigate the applications in micro operator positioning, tracking for distributed systems, and movement optimization in micro-assembly. Experiments are carried out on a micro-assembly platform equipped with three microscopes and six robot arms, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.