Visual Marker Guided Point Cloud Registration in a Large Multi-Sensor Industrial Robot Cell

This paper presents a benchmark and accuracy analysis of 3D sensor calibration in a large industrial robot cell. The sensors used were the Kinect v2 which contains both an RGB and an IR camera measuring depth based on the time-of-flight principle. The approach taken was based on a novel procedure combining Aruco visual markers, methods using region of interest and iterative closest point. The calibration of sensors is performed pairwise, exploiting the fact that time-of-flight sensors can have some overlap in the generated point cloud data. For a volume measuring 10m × 14m × 5m a typical accuracy of the generated point cloud data of 5–10cm was achieved using six sensor nodes.