Calibrating Industrial Robots with Absolute Position Tracking System

Industry 4.0 vision is related to flexible and reconfigurable production systems with a special focus on robotic systems. Accuracy of robots together with decreased time needed for robot calibration are the key success factors for robotic production systems. This paper reflects lessons learned from calibrating robot tools (such as grippers) and local coordinate systems (such as warehouse plates or shuttle plates) in industrial setting. We propose a new method for robot tool and workplace calibration with an absolute tracking system, in our case produced by Leica. Compared to the traditional manual approach relying on moving the robot arm to specific positions that are considered relatively to other objects, the proposed absolute approach is faster and more precise. It is contact-less compared to the currently used methods and thus it reduces risks of damages by accidental collisions. On the other hand, it requires costly equipment that is not frequent on production sites. The proposed approach is demonstrated on the Industry 4.0 Testbed use-case, hosted at the Czech Technical University in Prague. With this approach, we are able to make the robot calibration faster and more precise.