Self-calibration for a welding robot based on kinematics and Matlab software

Calibration is very important work to improve the position and orientation accuracy of robots. This paper presents a method for the kinematic self-calibration of a joint welding robot. The simulating operation was made by using the method of least square of Matlab software and the kinematic equation of the robot. The influences of system and random measure errors to the calibration results were analyzed. The results show that the method was practicable. The main advantage of this method is it can be executed rapidly without external complex sensors to measure the position or the orientation of the robot.