An Unified Iterative Hand-Eye Calibration Method for Eye-on-Base and Eye-in-Hand Setups

Abstract

This paper presents an accurate and precise hand-eye calibration technique based on minimization of the reprojection error. Unlike traditional hand-eye calibration, the proposed method does not require an explicit estimate of the camera pose for each input image because it does not rely on mathematical description and problem formulation commonly used in standard hand-eye calibration algorithms. The proposed method is based on a nonlinear optimization problem, so that the estimation problem can be solved efficiently and robustly, and can be easily extended to different camera-robot setups (e.g., eye-on-base or eye-in-hand). An extensive evaluation based on simulated and real experiments has been performed, proving its good estimation accuracy in terms of reprojection error. The experimental results with real robots show that the proposed method is applicable to relevant industrial contexts and improves the quality and precision of the camera-robot transformation estimation with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.