In Situ Translational Hand-Eye Calibration of Laser Profile Sensors using Arbitrary Objects

Abstract

Hand-eye calibration of laser profile sensors is the process of extracting the homogeneous transformation between the laser profile sensor frame and the end-effector frame of a robot in order to express the data extracted by the sensor in the robot's global coordinate system. For laser profile scanners this is a challenging procedure, as they provide data only in two dimensions and state-of-the-art calibration procedures require the use of specialised calibration targets. This paper presents a novel method to extract the translation-part of the hand-eye calibration matrix with rotation-part known a priori in a target-agnostic way. Our methodology is applicable to any 2D image or 3D object as a calibration target and can also be performed in situ in the final application. The method is experimentally validated on a real robot-sensor setup with 2D and 3D targets.