ABSTRACT
Kinematic modeling is the first step in a robot calibration process. A robot kinematic model relates the outputs of the robot joint sensors to the pose of the robot end-effector. One of the goals of robot calibration is to improve the accuracy of the robot by modifying its kinematic model parameters residing in the robot controller. As argued by robot calibration researchers, a kinematic model suitable for robot calibration should be complete and proportional. A complete kinematic model is one that has the capability of relating the joint displacements to the tool pose for any manipulator geometry, while allowing for the arbitrary placement of the world frame and arbitrary assignment of the manipulator zero position. The most general spatial displacement of a rigid body can be characterized as a screw displacement, that is a translation along and a rotation about a screw axis.
