Camera calibration issues in robot calibration with eye-on-hand configuration

One of the possible methods for accurate, fast, low-cost and automated robot calibration is to employ a single camera rigidly mounted to the robot end-effector together with a single camera calibration board. The end-effector pose is measured by calibration of the camera at every robot measurement configuration. This paper contends that, with several modifications, Tsai's radial alignment constraint (RAC) camera calibration method can be made a fast and sufficiently accurate pose measurement technique. This paper focuses on speed, accuracy and cost enhancement of RAC-based camera calibration. A fast RAC-based algorithm is proposed, which cuts the computation time of Tsai's original algorithm by about a 5: 1 ratio while keeping its accuracy within the tolerances required for a successful robot calibration. A low-cost method for estimation of the ratio of scale factors of the camera/vision system is also proposed. This method does not require a precision vertical micrometer stage to provide non-coplanar calibration points data for camera calibration. Finally, the phenomenon of perspective projection distortion of circular camera calibration points is fully analyzed and error compensation methods are proposed.