Automatic Robot Hand-Eye Calibration Enabled by Learning-Based 3D Vision

Hand-eye calibration, a fundamental task in vision-based robotic systems, is commonly equipped with collaborative robots, especially for robotic applications in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Most approaches to hand-eye calibration rely on external markers or human assistance. We proposed a novel methodology that addresses the hand-eye calibration problem using the robot base as a reference, eliminating the need for external calibration objects or human intervention. Using point clouds of the robot base, a transformation matrix from the coordinate frame of the camera to the robot base is established as “I=AXB.” To this end, we exploit learning-based 3D detection and registration algorithms to estimate the location and orientation of the robot base. The robustness and accuracy of the method are quantified by ground-truth-based evaluation, and the accuracy result is compared with other 3D vision-based calibration methods. To assess the feasibility of our methodology, we carried out experiments utilizing a low-cost structured light scanner across varying joint configurations and groups of experiments. The proposed hand-eye calibration method achieved a translation deviation of 0.930 mm and a rotation deviation of 0.265 degrees according to the experimental results. Additionally, the 3D reconstruction experiments demonstrated a rotation error of 0.994 degrees and a position error of 1.697 mm. Moreover, our method offers the potential to be completed in 1 second, which is the fastest compared to other 3D hand-eye calibration methods. We conduct indoor 3D reconstruction and robotic grasping experiments based on our hand-eye calibration method. Related code is released at https://github.com/leihui6/LRBO.