A Tool for Kinematic Error Analysis of Robots/Active Vision Systems

In this paper a generic kinematic model for robot structure error analysis is built and then is extended to analyze an active vision system. An active vision system is a robot device for controlling the motion of cameras based on visual information. Because the models are derived from the Denavit-Hartenberg transformation matrix, differential changes for the transformation matrix and link parameters, and the fundamental algorithm for estimating depth using stereo cameras, they are generic and can be used for any robot system or for stereo active vision systems. Based on this model, we created a software tool which functions as a C++ class library. The primary advantage of using this tool is that we can estimate the kinematic error at the design stage instead of at the calibration stage, which is more complicated work, especially for an active vision system or a binocular head. Furthermore, we can estimate the robot pose error or depth estimation error given the manufacturing tolerances.