Calibrating a Robot Camera

This paper addresses the problem of calibrating a camera mounted on a robot arm. The objective is to estimate the camera's intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. These include the relative position and orientation of camera with respect to robot base as well as the relative position and orientation of the camera with respect to a pre-defined world frame. A calibration object with a known 3D shape is used together with two known movements of the robot. A method is presented to find calibration parameters within an optimisation framework. This method differs from existing methods in that 1) it fully exploits information from different displacements of the camera to produce an optimal calibration estimate, and 2) it uses an evolutionary algorithm to attain the optimal solution. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data are presented.