Bootstrapping a robot's kinematic model

We present a system that is able to autonomously build a 3D model of a robot’s hand, along with a kinematic model of the robot’s arm, beginning with very little information. The system starts by using exploratory motions to locate and centre the robot’s hand in the middle of its field of view, and then progressively builds the 3D and kinematic models. The system is flexible, and easy to integrate with different robots, because the model building process does not require any fiducial markers to be attached to the robot’s hand. To validate the models built by the systemwe perform a number of experiments. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the hand model built by the system can be tracked with a precision in the order of 1 mm, and that the kinematic model is accurate enough to reliably position the hand of the robot in camera space. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.