Modeless industrial robot calibration plays an important role in the increasing employment of robots in industry. This approach allows to develop a procedure able to compensate the pose errors without complex parametric model. The paper presents a study aimed at comparing neural-kinematic (N-K) architectures for a modeless non-parametric robotic calibration. A multilayer perceptron feed-forward neural network, trained in a supervised manner with the back-propagation learning technique, is coupled in different modes with the ideal kinematic model of the robot. A comparative performance analysis of different neural-kinematic architectures was executed on a two degrees of freedom SCARA manipulator, for direct and inverse kinematics. Afterward the optimal schemes have been identified and further tested on a three degrees of freedom full SCARA robot and on a Stewart platform. The analysis on simulated data shows that the accuracy of the robot pose can be improved by an order of magnitude after compensation.

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