Kinematic calibration and pose measurement of a medical parallel manipulator by optical position sensors

In the applications of parallel manipulators, kinematic calibration is required to eliminate the errors resulting from the manufacturing and assembly of both base and tools. In this paper, a calibration method of base and tool transformation is developed by virtue of optical position sensors. An error model for calibration is constructed using differential geometry method. The pose error is obtained based on pose measurement results of OPTOTRAK 3020, a commercial 3D position measurement system. An iterative least squares procedure is used to identify the error parameters in the base and tool transformations. Simulation and experiment results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for transformation matrices calibration. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.