Warning

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

KUKA calibration program

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

Before following these KUKA 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: PickitMultiPoseCal

Attention

The examples contained in the Pickit application files contain hard-coded robot poses that should be adapted to every new robot. When executing such programs for the first time, please do so in manual mode and at low speed to check for potential collisions.

This example program can be found in R1 > Program > Pickit.

DEF PickitMultiPoseCal( )
    FOLD INI;%{PE}

    PTP home

    PTP P1
    WAIT SEC 0.5
    Pickit_do_calibration()

    PTP P2
    WAIT SEC 0.5
    Pickit_do_calibration()

    ...

    PTP P10
    WAIT SEC 0.5
    Pickit_do_calibration()

    PTP home

END

Below, each step of the program is explained.

Teach calibration points

The calibration program requires ten poses to be defined (P1 - P10). 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).