Identification of kinematic parameters of multiple closed chain robotic manipulators working in coordination

The authors present the design, development, and implementation of a kinematic calibration procedure for robot manipulators working in coordination in a multiple robot facility. The objectives of this work were two-fold: (i) to identify the individual kinematic parameters of each robot, such as the link lengths, joint angles, etc., and (ii) to identify the global kinematic parameters of the multiple robot environment, such as the relative positions and orientations of the individual robot base frames. The identification required a multidimensional numerical root seeking procedure that behaved better than the traditionally used Newton-Raphson technique. A development of such a procedure (customized to the requirement of calibration) is outlined. The procedure was found to be extremely robust, as it handles the complexity of the model of five bar mechanism quite efficiently