Optimising Configurations of KUKA LWR4+ Manipulator for Calibration with Optical CMM

This work is aimed at a comprehensive discussion of experiments and numerical procedures for the open-loop geometric calibration of the KUKA LWR4+ redundant robotic arm, when a full 6D end-effector’s pose is measured using Nikon K610 optical coordinate measuring machine (CMM). The later includes a comparative analysis of three different conjugate-type and meta-heuristic iterative algorithms used for numerical optimization of two observability indexes associated with Jacobian properties of the manipulator kinematics. While the former is based an original LEDs fixture design, which geometry is important for organization of the experiment. To the best of our knowledge, such integrated efforts are new for the KUKA robot widely used in robotics research community.