Kinematic calibration of the Gough Platform

Abstract

Kinematic calibration is essential to improve the accuracy of the manipulator. This paper presents a complete description of the Gough platform modeling and a unified scheme to identify its kinematic parameters. The interest of this formulation is that it may be applied whatever information is available on the state of the robot (measurement or constraints) without using the kinematics to obtain the basic system of constraint equations. Moreover, the scheme may be applied for all parallel robots. We propose to experiment and compare three methods of calibration, using either (or both) external measurement and internal redundant sensors. Finally, we show how to reduce the initial error in pose determination by 99% for the Hexapode 300, CMW's machining center, and validate the choice of a self-calibration method in an industrial context.