Measuring the absolute accuracy of an ABB IRB 1600 industrial robot with a Faro laser tracker

A Faro ION laser tracker is used to measure the absolute accuracy of an ABB IRB 1600-6/1.45 industrial robot after our own calibration procedure with the laser tracker. The laser tracker and the robot are controlled by Matlab in real time via an Ethernet LAN connection.The orientation of the end-effector is chosen so that at least one of the eight SMRs is always visible by the laser tracker. The measurements are taken in one thousand arbitrary configurations, within the complete robot's joint space. After calibration, the mean / maximum position errors at eight different measurement points on the end-effector (all offset from axis 6 by approximately 120 mm) are reduced from 0.959 mm / 2.072 mm, respectively, to 0.364 mm / 0.696 mm. The test was performed in the Control and Robotics Lab at the ÉTS, Montreal. http://www.youtube.com/CoRoETS http://coro.etsmtl.ca/