An easy hand-eye calibration method for laser profile scanners in high precision applications using optimized view poses

Accurately solving the problem of hand-eye calibration is a fundamental requirement for high-precision robotic applications involving a vision sensor. Particularly in the case of 2D laser profile scanners, its complexity increases since individual 2D measurements are not sufficient to calculate the positional and rotational relationship between tool and scanner. In this work, we propose a novel method to solve the hand-eye calibration problem for a robot-guided 2D laser sensor. Our approach is easy to implement, does not require expert knowledge, uses everyday objects instead of expensive calibration pieces, and runs automatically with minimal user interaction. Furthermore, we present an algorithm to automatically determine an optimized set of view poses. We evaluate our approach on a welding robot application and compare the results to existing methods. Our method achieves an accuracy of 0.3 mm in terms of a mean absolute error metric in the robot cell shown in Fig. 1.