A Novel Camera-to-Robot Calibration Method for Vision-Based Floor Measurements

2026-03-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the insufficient accuracy of hand-eye calibration in visual metrology for ground mobile robots by proposing a high-precision calibration method that fuses laser tracking with camera imaging. A custom reference board integrating laser retroreflectors and visual calibration patterns is designed to jointly estimate the poses of the reference board, camera, and robot, thereby solving for the transformation between the camera and the robot base. The approach innovatively combines the sub-millimeter three-dimensional metrology of a laser tracker with two-dimensional visual imaging, enabling cross-modal high-precision calibration. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves sub-millimeter repeatability in positioning, significantly enhancing the applicability of mobile robots in vision-based ground measurement tasks.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

A novel hand-eye calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots is proposed. While cameras on mobile robots are com- mon, they are rarely used for ground-observing measurement tasks. Laser trackers are increasingly used in robotics for precise localization. A referencing plate is designed to combine the two measurement modalities of laser-tracker 3D metrology and camera- based 2D imaging. It incorporates reflector nests for pose acquisition using a laser tracker and a camera calibration target that is observed by the robot-mounted camera. The procedure comprises estimating the plate pose, the plate-camera pose, and the robot pose, followed by computing the robot-camera transformation. Experiments indicate sub-millimeter repeatability.

Problem

• hand-eye calibration
• vision-based measurement
• mobile robot
• camera-to-robot calibration
• ground observation

Innovation

• hand-eye calibration
• laser tracker
• vision-based measurement
• mobile robot
• reference plate