Warning

You are reading the documentation for an older Pickit release (3.1). Documentation for the latest release (3.4) can be found here.

ABB calibration program

This example program requires that Pickit is installed and set up with your robot. For installation instructions, please refer to the ABB installation and setup article.

Before following the ABB specific instructions in this article, make sure you first understand the process of executing a robot-camera calibration as explained on Calibration.

Note

If you want to perform perform robot-camera calibration infrequently, you don’t need to write a calibration robot program. You can teach the calibration poses manually using the robot pendant and the Collect current pose button of the calibration wizard.

If, on the other hand, you expect to run calibration multiple times, an automated calibration program makes sense. You can run it whenever the camera has moved with respect to its fixture. This is the case when you’re setting up your application and the camera location is not yet fully decided. It can also be the result of calibration validation detecting an unexpected change.

Example program: MultiPoseCalibration

This example program can be found as a routine in the Pickit_calibration module. Go to Program Editor > Modules > Pickit_calibration > MultiPoseCalibration().

PROC MultiPoseCalibration()
     !
     MoveToCalPoint pCalibration1;
     WaitTime 0.5;
     pickit_find_calib_plate;
     !
     MoveToCalPoint pCalibration2;
     WaitTime 0.5;
     pickit_find_calib_plate;
     !
     ...
     !
     MoveToCalPoint pCalibration10;
     WaitTime 0.5;
     pickit_find_calib_plate;
     !
     Stop;
 ENDPROC

Teach calibration points

The calibration program requires ten poses to be defined. For more information on how to define these poses, see the article on Multi poses calibration.

The function MoveToCalPoint is a helper function defined by Pickit. This will throw an error if one of the calibration points is not yet defined by the user.

Execute the calibration program

Before running the calibration program, you can optionally activate the Calibration page in the Pickit web interface, which provides feedback on calibration plate visibility and progress of the calibration process (more).

Note

By default the robot flange (tool0) and the robot base (wobj0) are used to move to these points.

Calibration with ABB YuMi

The ABB YuMi is a robot with two arms and relatively small workspace and payload. Refer to the calibration with an ABB YuMi article for details on how to take these constraints into account during calibration.