Autonomous Calibration of a 2D Laser Displacement Sensor by Matching a Single Point on a Flat Structure

In this paper, we introduce an autonomous calibration method for a 2D laser displacement sensor (e.g. laser vision sensor and laser range finder) by matching a single point on a flat structure. Many arc welding robots install a 2D laser displacement sensor to expand their application by recognizing their environment (e.g. base metal and seam). In such systems, sensing data should be transformed to the robot's coordinates, and the geometric relation (i.e. rotation and translation) between the robot's coordinates and sensor coordinates should be known for the transformation. Calibration means the inference process of geometric relation between the sensor and robot. Generally, the matching of more than 3 points is required to infer the geometric relation. However, we introduce a novel method to calibrate using only 1 point matching and use a specific flat structure (i.e. circular hole) which enables us to find the geometric relation with a single point matching. We make the rotation component of the calibration results as a constant to use only a single point by moving a robot to a specific pose. The flat structure can be installed easily in a manufacturing site, because the structure does not have a volume (i.e. almost 2D structure). The calibration process is fully autonomous and does not need any manual operation. A robot which installed the sensor moves to the specific pose by sensing features of the circular hole such as length of chord and center position of the chord. We show the precision of the proposed method by performing repetitive experiments in various situations. Furthermore, we applied the result of the proposed method to sensor based seam tracking with a robot, and report the difference of the robot's TCP (Tool Center Point) trajectory. This experiment shows that the proposed method ensures precision.

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