Calibration and compensation of deflections and compliances in remote handling equipment configurations

This paper presents a generic method of calibrating and compensating remote handling system configurations subject to manufacturing and assembly tolerances, deflections and compliances. A method consists of kinematic part and non-kinematic part. A kinematic calibration algorithm is presented for finding the values of kinematic model errors by measuring the end-effector Cartesian position. This is a conventional way to calibrate industrial robots. However, in this case the kinematic calibration is not able to compensate flaws fully due to large deflections and compliances caused by a massive Cassette payload (approx. 9 ton). Positioning error at the furthest point of the cassette before any compensation was 80 mm. Therefore, extra compensation must be introduced in addition to a kinematic calibration. A kinematic calibration together with an extra compensation is a demanding task to carry out. The resulting complex compensation function has to be such that it can be implemented in real-time Cassette Multifunctional Mover (CMM) control system software.