A flexible method combining camera calibration and hand-eye calibration

SUMMARY We consider the conventional techniques of vision robot system calibration where camera parameters and robot hand-eye parameters are computed separately, i.e., first performing camera calibration and then carrying out hand-eye calibration based on the calibrated parameters of cameras. In this paper we propose a joint algorithm that combines the camera calibration and the hand-eye calibration together. The proposed algorithm gives the solutions of the cameras' parameters and the hand-eye parameters simultaneously by using nonlinear optimization. Both simulations and real experiments show the superiority of our algorithm. We also apply our algorithm in the real application of the robot-assisted surgical system, and very good results have been obtained.