Kinematic parameter identification procedure of an articulated arm coordinate measuring machine based on a metrology platform

A still current challenge of paramount importance for manufacturing metrology is the industry and laboratories’ increasing demand for faster inspection and verification measuring procedures to determine the conformance of products to dimensional or functional requirements. Within this context, a measuring system group that has gained great importance in the field of high precision dimensional verification are the portable coordinate measuring machines (PCMMs) such as articulated arm coordinate measuring machine (AACMM). Nevertheless, an important drawback of these type of instruments are the time-consuming, tedious, and expensive tasks inherent to their verification and kinematic parameter identification procedures. In this work, a kinematic parameter identification procedure of an AACMM by means of an indexed metrology platform is presented. Moreover, the kinematic modeling of the AACMM is developed, and the optimization of the arm kinematic parameters to minimize the measurement error is carried out in terms of eight objective functions. Finally, a comparison between the optimized parameters and the nominal parameters is discussed, showing the advantages of using the indexed metrology platform (IMP) in the optimization procedure.