In situ calibration of joint torque sensors of the KUKA LightWeight robot using only internal controller data

The Kuka LWR is equipped with torque sensors mounted on the link side of the actuated joints. Each torque sensor is calibrated separately before it is mounted on the robot. This needs a second calibration at the last stage of the assembling of the robot in order to take into account the effect of the robot structure. This final in situ calibration is necessary to improve the accuracy of the estimation of the interaction wrench of the robot end-effector with its environment. However, the proposed calibration techniques are usually complicated, time-consuming, and must be carried out before assembling the sensors on the robot. In this paper, a simple and fast method for calibrating the sensors once they are assembled on the robot is presented. The method is based on the least squares solution of an over-determined linear system obtained with the robot inverse dynamic identification model in which are included the sensor gains. This model is calculated with sensor measurement and joint position sampled data available in the controller while the robot is tracking some reference trajectories without load on the robot and some trajectories with a known payload fixed on the robot. The method is experimentally validated on the Kuka LWR4+ but can be applied to any similar kind of robot equipped with joint torque sensors.