Inspired by box jellyfish that has distributed and complementary perceptive system, we seek to equip manipulator with a camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to perceive ego motion and surrounding unstructured environment. Before robot perception, a reliable and high-precision calibration between camera, IMU and manipulator is a critical prerequisite. This paper introduces a novel calibration system. First, we seek to correlate the spatial relationship between the sensing units and manipulator in a joint framework. Second, the manipulator moving trajectory is elaborately designed in a spiral pattern that enables full excitations on yaw–pitch–roll rotations and x–y–z translations in a repeatable and consistent manner. The calibration has been evaluated on our collected visual inertial-manipulator dataset. The systematic comparisons and analysis indicate the consistency, precision and effectiveness of our proposed calibration method.

Illustration on box jellyfish. a Group of box jellyfish in the ocean; b box jellyfish and its perceptive system located approximately near the limbs; c structure of its vision and statolith; d its distributed lens eyes

This work is carried out by Yinlong Zhang1,2,3 · Wei Liang1,2,3 · Sichao Zhang1,2,3 · Xudong Yuan1,2,3 · Xiaofang Xia4  · Jindong Tan5  · Zhibo Pang6

1 State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China 
2 Key Laboratory of Networked Control Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China 
3 Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110169, China 
4 The School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
5 Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Konxville 37996, USA
6 Department of Automation Technology, ABB Corporate Research Sweden, 72178 V?ster?s, Sweden

and published on JBE Volume 19,  Issue 2,  March 2022, Page 299–313 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-022-00163-7