Warning

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

Fanuc calibration program

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

Before following these Fanuc 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: PICKIT_MP_CALIBRATE

Note

For the older R-J3iB controller, the calibration program is called EX_MP_CA.

This example program can be found in Select.

 1:  CALL PI_OPEN_COMMUNICATION    ;
 2:  UTOOL_NUM=9 ;
 3:  UFRAME_NUM=0 ;
 4:L P[1] 100mm/sec FINE    ;
 5:  CALL PI_CALIBRATE    ;
 6:L P[2] 100mm/sec FINE    ;
 7:  CALL PI_CALIBRATE    ;
...
22:L P[10] 100mm/sec FINE    ;
23:  CALL PI_CALIBRATE    ;

Below, each step of the program is explained.

Define the tool for calibration

In the calibration program the plate can be mounted to flange of the robot or clamped tightly with a gripper. The tool settings for the calibration program can be set to anything that suits best your setup. In the example program by default UTOOL9 is used.

Set user frame

Calibration is done relative to the base frame of the robot, hence UFRAME0 is selected.

Teach calibration poses

The calibration program requires 10 poses to be defined. For more information on how to define these poses, see the article on Multi poses calibration.

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).