In Situ Calibration of Six-Axis Force–Torque Sensors for Industrial Robots With Tilting Base

The accuracy of the force–torque sensors generally decreases with time under standard operating conditions. Therefore, periodic calibration for force–torque sensors is necessary. Specialized devices or subsidiary sensors are required during the traditional calibration process which bring in external measurement errors. In this article, an
in situ
calibration method is proposed to calibrate the force–torque sensor with a single standard mass to generate expected wrenches of the sensor during some arbitrary robot poses. Since the tilt of the mounting base of the robot can affect the direction of the gravity expressed with respect to the sensor frame, we first derive a model to express the relationship between the raw measurements and the expected wrenches under the influence of the tilted base, and then introduce subspaces and take advantage of projection and Rayleigh quotient to obtain the calibration matrix and angles of tilting simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is validated on simulation and the industrial automation (ATI) force–torque sensor. The results show that the proposed method is more cost-effective and reliable than existing technologies.