IABC: An iteratively automatic machine learning boosted hand-eye calibration method for laser displacement sensor

An on-machine measuring (OMM) system with a laser displacement sensor (LDS) is designed for measuring free-form surfaces of hypersonic aircraft’s radomes. To improve the measurement accuracy of the OMM system, a novel Iteratively Automatic machine learning Boosted hand-eye Calibration (IABC) method is proposed. Both the hand-eye relationship and LDS measurement errors can be calibrated in one calibration process without any hardware changes via IABC. Firstly, a new objective function is derived, containing analytical parameters of the hand-eye relationship and LDS errors. Then, a hybrid calibration model composed of two kernels is proposed to solve the objective function. One kernel is the analytical kernel designed for solving analytical parameters. Another kernel is the automatic machine learning (AutoML) kernel designed to model LDS errors. The two kernels are connected with stepwise iterations to find the best calibration results. Compared with traditional methods, hand-eye experiments show that IABC reduces the calibration RMSE by about 50%. Verification experiments show that IABC reduces the measurement deviations by about 25%-50% and RMSEs within 40%. Even when the training data are obviously less than the test data, IABC performs well. Experiments demonstrate that IABC is more accurate than traditional hand-eye methods.