Fast calibration of industrial mobile robots to workstations using QR codes

Much research is directed at developing increasingly efficient and flexible production, and one important potential advancement is the robots known as Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulators (AIMMs). The idea behind AIMMs is to have robots that can move around and have the ability to perform a wide variety of tasks, while at the same time being fast and easy to configure and program. When an AIMM moves from one workstation to another, it is essential that it is able to calibrate its position with respect to that new station. In this paper, a new and fast calibration method based on QR codes is proposed. With this QR calibration, it is possible to calibrate an AIMM to a workstation in 3D in less than 1 second, which is significantly faster than existing methods. The accuracy of the calibration is ±4 mm. The method is modular in the sense that it directly supports integration and calibration of a new camera. The calibration have been implemented on Aalborg University´s AIMM, Little Helper [8, 9], and tested both in a laboratory and in a real-life industrial environment at the Danish pump manufacturer Grundfos A/S.