Kinematic Calibration of Robots Using a Single Draw-Wire Encoder: A Comparison

The demand for industrial manipulators with higher accuracy has been continuously growing over the past two decades, and so has the demand for affordable robot calibration procedures. Recently, different cost-effective calibration procedures have been proposed: among them, we focused on the ones that use 1D distance measurement data obtained through a draw-wire encoder. The aim of this paper is to critically compare these calibration procedures - which differs mainly in the choice of the encoder fixed location and the calibration points - and assess the required accuracy of the encoder in order to obtain reliable results.