Inaccurate positioning of the robot end effector causes joint
deformation as well as geometric errors when an industrial robot
has a payload at its end effector. We propose a
new approach of calibration which deals with joint angle dependent
errors to compensate for these phenomena. To implement this method,
we divided the robot workspace into several local regions, and
built a calibration equation by generating the constraint conditions of
the end effector's motion in each local region using a
three-dimensional position measurement system. The parameter errors obtained this way
were interpolated using the Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) so
as to estimate calibration errors in the regions that we
did not measure. We used this technique to improve the
performance of a six DOF industrial robot used for arc
welding.