Toward general industrial robot cell calibration

In an industrial robot automation system (robot cell), the relationship between robot, tools and work piece are needed to be identified, so called robot cell calibration. This paper presents the recent progress of industrial robot automation system calibration. An industrial perspective is adopted to review methodologies, which are from either industrial products or published R&D results conducted by the robotics industry. After analyzing the customer demands, the general industrial robot cell calibration method with the define robot cell and workflow concept is proposed to solve the easy-to-use and cost-efficiency issue in robot cell calibration. The successful implementations in ABB simulation software (RobotStudio) and in ABB robot teach pendant of the proposed method demonstrate how a standard calibration package solves all the needs of the calibration.