Calibration of a micromanipulation system

Calibration is indispensable for automatic micromanipulation. In this paper, using the height difference between different focus planes detected from the microscope and the coordinates of the probe measured from encoders, systematic methods to calibrate the relative position and orientation between the tools and the microscope are developed. Using the least square error (LSE) method to process the data measured, the influence of various positioning errors can be reduced. Experiments are performed to calibrate a micromanipulation system using the proposed methods. The calibration results are validated by cross verification through further experiments.