Kinematic calibration of a 3-DOF planar parallel robot

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a calibration method developed to improve the absolute accuracy of a novel three degrees-of-freedom planar parallel robot. The robot is designed for the precise alignment of semiconductor wafers and, even though its complete workspace is slightly larger, the accuracy improvements are performed within a target workspace, in which the positions are on a disc of 170 mm in diameter and the orientations are in the range ±17°. Design/methodology/approach – The calibration method makes use of a single optimization model, based on the direct kinematic calibration approach, while the experimental data are collected from two sources. The first source is a measurement arm from FARO Technologies, and the second is a Mitutoyo coordinate measurement machine (CMM). The two sets of calibration results are compared. Findings – Simulation confirmed that the model proposed is not sensitive to measurement noise. An experimental validation on the CMM shows that the absolute accuracy inside the target workspace was improved, by reducing the maximum position and orientation errors from 1.432 mm and 0.107°, respectively, to 0.044 mm and 0.009°. Originality/value – This paper presents a calibration method which makes it possible to accurately identify the actual robot’s base frame (base frame calibration), at the same time as identifying and compensating for geometric errors, actuator offsets, and even screw lead errors. The proposed calibration method is applied on a novel planar robot, and its absolute accuracy was found to improve to 0.044 mm.