Autonomous robot calibration for hand-eye coordination

Autonomous robot calibration is defined as the process of determining a robot's model by using only its internal sensors. It is shown that autonomous calibration of a manipulator and stereo camera system is possible. The proposed autonomous calibration algorithm may obtain the manipulator kinematic parameters, external kinematic camera parameters, and internal camera parameters. To do this, only joint angle readings and camera image plane data are used. A condition for the identifiability of the manipulator/camera parameters is derived. The method is a generalization of a recently developed scheme for self-calibrating a manipulator by forming it into a mobile closed-loop kinematic chain.