Inclusion of Bidirectional Angular Positioning Deviations in the Kinematic Model of a Six-DOF Articulated Robot for Static Volumetric Error Compensation

To improve a robot’s absolute positioning accuracy, researchers have extensively studied the robot kinematic model containing position and orientation errors of rotary axis average lines, widely known as Denavit–Hartenberg (D-H) parameters. To further improve the absolute positioning accuracy of industrial robots, this article proposes a novel kinematic model and its identification scheme. The proposed kinematic model for a serial-linked industrial robot contains the bidirectional angular positioning deviations of each rotary axis, represented in a lookup table, in addition to its D-H parameters. The angular positioning deviations of the rotary axes are modeled as a function of angular command positions, along with the direction of rotation to model the influence of backlash. This article also proposes a novel approach to identify the proposed kinematic model with the bidirectional angular positioning deviations using a laser tracker with indexing each rotary axis at specified angular positions (“circle point method”). Moreover, the model-based compensation technique is being experimentally investigated to validate the prediction accuracy of the proposed model. The findings of the experiment show that the proposed model enhances the robot’s absolute positioning accuracy significantly over the entire workspace.