# ARC-Calib: Autonomous Markerless Camera-to-Robot Calibration via Exploratory Robot Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14701/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Camera-to-Robot Pose Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09231/) (2019)
- [Single-view robot pose and joint angle estimation via render & compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09359/) (2021)
- [Markerless Camera-to-Robot Pose Estimation via Self-supervised Sim-to-Real Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14332/) (2023)
- [CRAVES: Controlling Robotic Arm with a Vision-based Economic System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00725/) (2018)
- [EasyHeC: Accurate and Automatic Hand-eye Calibration via Differentiable Rendering and Space Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01191/) (2023)
- [CvxPnPL: A Unified Convex Solution to the Absolute Pose Estimation Problem from Point and Line Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10545/) (2019)
- [CtRNet-X: Camera-to-Robot Pose Estimation in Real-world Conditions Using a Single Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10441/) (2024)
- [Hand-Eye Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12655/) (2023)
- [ChESS - Quick and Robust Detection of Chess-board Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.5491/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camera-to-robot (also known as eye-to-hand) calibration is a critical component of vision-based robot manipulation. Traditional marker-based methods often require human intervention for system setup. Furthermore, existing autonomous markerless calibration methods typically rely on pre-trained robot tracking models that impede their application on edge devices and require fine-tuning for novel robot embodiments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a model-based markerless camera-to-robot calibration framework, ARC-Calib, that is fully autonomous and generalizable across diverse robots and scenarios without requiring extensive data collection or learning. First, exploratory robot motions are introduced to generate easily trackable trajectory-based visual patterns in the camera's image frames. Then, a geometric optimization framework is proposed to exploit the coplanarity and collinearity constraints from the observed motions to iteratively refine the estimated calibration result. Our approach eliminates the need for extra effort in either environmental marker setup or data collection and model training, rendering it highly adaptable across a wide range of real-world autonomous systems. Extensive experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate its robustness and generalizability.