A robot-camera hand/eye self-calibration system using a planar target

In many vision-based industrial robot applications, a camera is typically attached to a robot hand and the conversion relationship between the robot hand and the camera must be estimated accurately. Compared to the conventional complicated hand/eye calibration methods, in this paper, we propose a novel vision-based robotic hand/eye self-calibration method for industrial applications. Our method contains a fixed 2D calibration plane and a camera mounted on a moving robot hand. In our process, we compute the robot-camera relationship by pure translations and rotations of the robot hand. By doing this, we can eliminate the manual and tedious hand/eye calibration procedures performed by workers.