Hand-eye Calibration of Dual Mechanical Arms of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robot

The explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot works in a special environment, which requires dual robotic arms to work together for removing the bomb. Therefore, the coordinate calibration accuracy is the pre-requisite for realizing the coordinated movement and visual positioning of the dual robotic arms. A basic problem encountered in the collaborative work of the dual robotic arms system is to determine the homogeneous transformation matrix of the frame, including: hand-eye, base-base, and gripper-camera. We formulate the hand-eye calibration problem of the dual robotic arm as the matrix equation AXB = YCZD. 1) An improved closed solution for single-robotic arm hand-eye calibration is proposed. This closed solution of the single-robotic arm is used to quickly obtain the initial estimate of the iterative method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the iteration. 2) The iterative solution of dual robotic arms hand-eye calibration based on the rotation vector is proposed. 3) In addition, a motion trajectory plan of the mechanical gripper is proposed to guide the operator to select the appropriate robot posture during the calibration process. In order to show the feasibility and superiority of the proposed method, a real EOD robot experiment is carried out. The comparison results from experiments show that the proposed simultaneous calibration method has higher accuracy and efficiency.