Indentification and Compensation of Robot Kinematic Parameters for Positioning Accuracy Improvement

This paper presents a simple identification method of the actual kinematic parameters for the robot with parallel joints. It is known that Denavit-Hartenberg's coordinate system is not useful for nearly parallel joints. In this paper, the coordinate frames are reassigned to model the kinematic parameter between nearly parallel joints by four parameters. The proposed identification method uses a straight ruler about 1m long. A robot hand is placed by using a teaching pendant at the prescribed points on the ruler, and corresponding error function is defined. The identified kinematic parameters which make the error function zero are obtained by iterative least square error method based on the singular value decomposition. In the compensation of joint angles, only the position is considered because the usual applications of robot do not require a precise orientation control.