Kinematic model identification of industrial manipulators

The aim of the work presented in this paper is to improve the off-line programming capability of industrial robots by improving their accuracy. Rather than impose more strict manufacturing tolerances, it is widely accepted that a method of identifying kinematic parameters specific to each individual robot provides a cost effective way of improving accuracy. A procedure is presented for identification of actual kinematic parameters, which uses the plane of rotation and centre of rotation introduced by Stone. The procedure differs from that of Stone in that it makes use of the radius of rotation and also introduces a translation of the plane of rotation along the axis of rotation. This allows for the direct identification of the D–H model parameters which are more widely accepted and easier to interpret than the S model parameters. It is shown that, unlike the original method of Stone, the new procedure can also deal with the situation when two consecutive joint axes are parallel. The method is validated on both simulated data and real measured data for a Puma 560 robot, showing an improvement in positioning accuracy of around 80%.