Abstract
To reliably perform everyday tasks, collaborative robots must be accurate, not merely repeatable. Unfortunately, precise kinematic calibration often relies on tools that are more expensive than the robots themselves. We address this limitation by proposing a low-cost and effective calibration method aimed at democratizing cobot calibration. Our minimalist approach uses a single 3D-printable two-socket spherical-joint tool to kinematically constrain the robot end effector during data collection. An optimization routine updates the nominal kinematic model to ensure consistent socket predictions while preserving their mean distance. We validate the method on Franka, KUKA, and Kinova cobots, consistently reducing mean absolute errors, for example, from approximately 10 mm to 0.2 mm on Franka robots. To demonstrate practical impact, we further evaluate the calibrated model on a Franka robot in a peg-in-the-hole task with 0.4 mm tolerance and in a repeated drawing task using Cartesian control and learning from demonstration. Both tasks fail without calibration and consistently succeed with the calibrated model. The proposed method enables affordable and practical cobot calibration, providing a foundation for accurate manipulation tasks.
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Data availability
The data recorded for the experiments are different sets of joint configurations for each socket and are publicly available at https://github.com/platonics-delft/kinematics_calibration/tree/main/data.
Code availability
The code is publicly available at https://github.com/platonics-delft/kinematics_calibration.
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This work was conceptualized and developed by Giovanni Franzese and Max Spahn, during their affiliation with TU Delft. The work was advised by Jens Kober, Javier Alonso-Mora and Cosimo Della Santina.
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Communications Engineering thanks Guanbin Gao and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: [Philip Coatsworth]. A peer review file is available.
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Franzese, G., Spahn, M., Kober, J. et al. Accurate and affordable cobot calibration without external measurement devices. Commun Eng (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-026-00633-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-026-00633-4
