  Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks.
Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot
(cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates
the calibration process and increases the costs and time requirements.
Furthermore, the associated setup and measurement procedures require
significant human intervention, which makes them more challenging to operate.
Using the built-in force-torque sensors, which are nowadays a default component
in collaborative robots, this work proposes a self-calibration framework where
robot-environmental spatial relations are automatically estimated through
compliant exploratory actions by the robot itself. The self-calibration
approach converges, verifies its own accuracy, and terminates upon completion,
autonomously purely through interactive exploration of the environment's
geometries. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our
self-calibration approach in accurately establishing the robot-environment
spatial relationships without the need for additional sensing equipment or any
human intervention.
