Hand–eye calibration and positioning for a robot drilling system

Abstract

In the aircraft manufacturing, drilling large amount of assembly holes in aircraft board is one of the key bottlenecks of production efficiency. To enhance the efficiency and quality of assembly holes' manufacturing, robot drilling system replacing manual operation becomes more and more urgent. Normally, a robot system needs accurate mathematical models of the manufactured object and the environment when it's working; as a matter of fact, because of the manufacturing error, the homogeneity between aircraft board and its mathematical model is dissatisfied. So a hand–eye vision system is introduced to realize the positioning of the end effector in order to improve the flexibility and robustness of a robot drilling system. The paper discusses the calibration and positioning of a hand–eye vision system for a robotic aircraft board drilling system. Because the drill must be vertical and keep a fixed distance to the aircraft board surface before drilling, the depth information of hand–eye relationship is neglected and by defining an intermediate scene coordinate system the hand–eye relationship between the robot coordinate system and the vision coordinate system is established. Then the position of target point can be described in the robot coordinate system by using the calibrated hand–eye relationship, and thus the navigation information for the robot drilling system can be provided. Experimental results of the calibration and positioning of the hand–eye vision of a robot drilling system is provided, and the main factors that affect the positioning error are analyzed.