Complete stiffness model for a serial robot

The paper addresses a problem of robotic manipulator calibration. The main contributions are in the area of the elastostatic parameters identification. In contrast to other works, the considered approach takes into account elastic properties of both links and joint. Particular attention is paid to generation of the complete and irreducible stiffness model that is suitable for the identification. To solve the problem, physical and algebraic model reduction methods are proposed. They are based on taking into account the physical properties of the manipulator elements and structure of the corresponding observation matrix. The advantages of the developed approach are illustrated by an application example that deals with elastostatic calibration of an industrial robot.