A Learning-based Approach for Error Compensation of Industrial Manipulator with Hybrid Model

The industrial robot usually has high repeatability but relatively lower accuracy. Therefore, error compensation plays a pivotal role in many industrial robotic applications with high accuracy requirement. In this paper, we present a novel computational method that utilizes a hybrid model that consists of Local Product-Of-Exponential (POE) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to compensate the positioning errors of the industrial robotic manipulator for high accuracy industrial robotic applications. Specifically in the proposed method, the Local POE calibration method is first applied to calibrate the robot forward kinematic model to reduce the geometric error. Then the GPR is applied to learn the inverse kinematic model to further compensate the residual error in task space. We also demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method by showing the reduction of norm pose error by up to 37.2%, compared to the existing methods with multiple datasets.