Self-calibration of eye-to-hand and workspace for mobile service robot

The geometrical relationships among robot arm, camera, and workspace are important to carry out visual servo tasks. For industrial robots, the relationships are usually fixed and well calibrated by experienced operators. However, for service robots, particularly in mobile applications, the relationships might be changed. For example, when a mobile robot attempts to use the visual information from environmental cameras to perform grasping, it is necessary to know the relationships before taking actions. Moreover, the calibration should be done automatically. This chapter proposes a self-calibration method using a laser distance sensor mounted on the robot arm. The advantage of the method, as compared with patternbased one, is that the workspace coordinate is also obtained at the same time using the projected laser spot. Further, it is not necessary for the robot arm to enter the view scope of the camera for calibration. This increases the safety when the workspace is unknown initially.