Vision based 3D calibration of micromanipulator in microrobotic fiber characterization platform

Calibration is of great significance in the development of automatic micromanipulation systems. This paper presents a novel vision based procedure for three dimensional (3D) calibration of micromanipulators. Two major issues in the proposed calibration approach - vision system calibration and manipulator kinematic calibration - are discussed in details in this paper. Verification and evaluation experiments are conducted using a 3D micromanipulator in a microrobotic fiber characterization platform. The results demonstrate that the proposed calibration approach is able to reduce the pose error below 5 micrometers.