Calibration technology in application of robot-laser scanning system

A system composed of laser sensor and 6-DOF industrial robot is proposed to obtain complete three-dimensional (3-D) information of the object surface. Suitable for the different combining ways of laser sensor and robot, a new method to calibrate the position and pose between sensor and robot is presented. By using a standard sphere with known radius as a reference tool, the rotation and translation matrices between the laser sensor and robot are computed, respectively in two steps, so that many unstable factors introduced in conventional optimization methods can be avoided. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed calibration method can be achieved up to 0.062 mm. The calibration method is also implemented into the automated robot scanning system to reconstruct a car door panel.