Estimation of 4-DoF manipulator optimal configuration for autonomous camera calibration of a mobile robot using on-board templates

Abstract

Camera calibration is one of the important tasks in the field of robotics and computer vision. It enables to increase the accuracy of metric measurements in photogrammetry applications and provides higher performance in computer vision algorithms such as stereo matching and motion estimation. It is known that regardless of the calibration method used variation of given estimated camera parameters their is inevitable due to multiple reasons: varying weather conditions, temperature fluctuations or severe operation mode of a robotic system. In order to alleviate the aforementioned issues recalibration is required. In this work we employed 4-DoF manipulator Servosila Engineer mobile robotic system equipped with an on-board camera. In order to automate the process of calibration an algorithm is developed which enables to estimate optimal manipulator joint configurations. Forward kinematics is solved on a discretized set of joint angles, subsequently estimating possible camera positions for its further calibration. Experiments on real robot demonstrate the possibility of usage of the developed algorithm to find optimal joint configurations for automatic camera calibration.