In Situ Translational Hand-Eye Calibration of Laser Profile Sensors using Arbitrary Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel in situ method for calibrating laser profile sensors' translation component using arbitrary objects, eliminating the need for specialized targets and enabling calibration in the final application environment.

Contribution

The paper presents a target-agnostic, in situ calibration method for laser profile sensors that only requires known rotation, simplifying the calibration process.

Findings

Method successfully calibrates sensors with arbitrary objects.

Experimental validation shows accurate translation calibration.

Applicable to both 2D and 3D targets.

Abstract

Hand-eye calibration of laser profile sensors is the process of extracting the homogeneous transformation between the laser profile sensor frame and the end-effector frame of a robot in order to express the data extracted by the sensor in the robot's global coordinate system. For laser profile scanners this is a challenging procedure, as they provide data only in two dimensions and state-of-the-art calibration procedures require the use of specialised calibration targets. This paper presents a novel method to extract the translation-part of the hand-eye calibration matrix with rotation-part known a priori in a target-agnostic way. Our methodology is applicable to any 2D image or 3D object as a calibration target and can also be performed in situ in the final application. The method is experimentally validated on a real robot-sensor setup with 2D and 3D targets.