Simultaneous Hand-Eye/Robot-World/Camera-IMU Calibration

The problem of calibrating extrinsic parameter between camera and inertial measurement unit (IMU) using an industrial robotic manipulator has been studied. This generates a result of hand-eye/robot-world/camera-IMU calibration in a simultaneous fashion. The developed method is free of inertial integration over time and thus is robust to uncertain IMU biases. It is derived that the problem can be solved via a simultaneous optimization of hand-eye/robot-world/camera-IMU transformations. The resulted optimization is highly non-convex on the special Euclidean group and we give globally optimal solutions. Experiments verify that the proposed method is capable of estimating accurate calibration parameters. Comparative studies between representatives show the global optimality of the proposed method. The new simultaneous method is capable of conducting calibration of a robot/camera/IMU combination. The designed method guarantees the global optimality thus the accuracy is ensured. The developed globally optimal solutions will also be computationally efcient on modern industrial computers. Finally, we show that the proposed method can give accurate calibration results for a stereo/IMU sensor combination.