Comparative study of robot kinematic calibration algorithms using a unified geometric framework

In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of three well known robot kinematic calibration algorithms, namely the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameter algorithm, the product of exponentials (POE) algorithm, and the local POE (LPOE) algorithm. To cope with distinct formulations associated to different algorithms, we propose a unified geometric framework which is based on POE kinematics and a novel Adjoint error model. The Adjoint error model offers us an extremely efficient way to benchmark the aforesaid calibration algorithms, and also compare them to a novel calibration algorithm based on the Adjoint error model.