Comparison study of the geometric parameters calibration methods

This paper presents a comparison study on the methods of geometric parameters calibration of robots. The study takes into consideration classical methods which require the measuring of the position or location (position and orientation) of the terminal link using external sensors and self calibration methods which carry out the calibration of the geometric parameters using only the joint position sensors. The comparison is focused on the identifiable parameters, on the condition number of the observation matrix, and on the convergence rate of the solution. The study is carried out by simulating the Puma and Stanford robots, but general conclusions are derived.