The Advantage of Mounting a Camera onto a Robot Arm

{ In this paper we describe a method for recovering Euclidean structure of an unknown scene with an uncalibrated camera mounted onto a robot arm. More precisely the method achieves the following tasks: the projective structure of the scene obtained with a projective reconstruction algorithm is converted into an Euclidean structure and the intrinsic camera parameters are estimated as well as the hand/eye calibration parameters. We cast the problem into a simple set of matrix equations and we determine under which motions the solution is unique. Then we provide a simple algorithm for implementing the method in practice. Finally the experimental results obtained with our method are compared with classical camera and hand/eye calibration techniques.