Three-dimensional calibration of micromanipulators using stereo vision

Calibration is of great significance in the development of automatic micromanipulation systems. This paper presents a novel vision based procedure for three-dimensional (3D) calibration of micromanipulators. Two major issues in the proposed calibration approach - vision system calibration and manipulator kinematic calibration - are discussed in detail in this paper. Verification and evaluation experiments are conducted using a 3D micromanipulator in a microrobotic fiber characterization platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed calibration approach is able to achieve prediction errors below 5 μm. The proposed approach also demonstrates the feasibility of calibrating the decoupled motions, by reducing the undesired movement from 28 μm to 8 μm (for 4,800 μm desired movement).