Hand-eye calibration of SCARA robots using dual quaternions

Abstract

In SCARA robots, which are often used in industrial applications, all joint axes are parallel, covering three degrees of freedom in translation and one degree of freedom in rotation. Therefore, conventional approaches for the hand-eye calibration of articulated robots cannot be used for SCARA robots. In this paper, we present a new linear method that is based on dual quaternions and extends the work of Daniilid is 1999 (IJRR) for SCARA robots. To improve the accuracy, a subsequent nonlinear optimization is proposed. We address several practical implementation issues and show the effectiveness of the method by evaluating it on synthetic and real data.