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

The problem of calibrating an extrinsic parameter between a camera and an 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 nonconvex 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 efficient on modern industrial computers. Finally, we show that the proposed method can give accurate calibration results for a stereo/IMU sensor combination.