Whole-body self-calibration via graph-optimization and automatic configuration selection

In this paper, we present a novel approach to accurately calibrate the kinematic model of a humanoid based on observations of its monocular camera. Our technique estimates the parameters of the complete model, consisting of the joint angle offsets of the whole body including the legs, as well as the camera extrinsic and intrinsic parameters. We cast the parameter estimation as a least-squares optimization problem. In the error function, we consider the residuals between camera observations of end-effector markers and their projections into the image based on the estimate of the calibration parameters. Furthermore, we developed an approach to automatically select a subset of configurations for the calibration process that yields a good trade-off between the number of observations and accuracy. As the experiments with a Nao humanoid show, we achieve an accurate calibration for this low-cost platform. Further, our approach to configuration selection yields substantially better optimization results compared to randomly chosen viable configurations. Hence, our system only requires a reduced number of configurations to achieve accurate results. Our optimization is general and the implementation, which is available online, can easily be applied to different humanoids.