Calibration of the Norwegian motion laboratory using conformal geometric algebra

This paper applies Conformal Geometric Algebra (CGA) as a tool for calibrating the robotic equipment found in the Norwegian Motion Laboratory. By using the inner product of CGA to measure the distance between a point and the surface of a plane/sphere, the least-squares method can be used to solve for the unknown parameters describing the plane/sphere in an efficient and intuitive way given n measured points. Positional data samples were acquired from using a high precision Laser tracker (FARO Xi), and the overall calibration error was found to be no more than 4.90mm, and the maximum standard deviation 3.25mm. In addition, the applied least-squares algorithm using CGA was twice as fast, when…