Abstract
Improving absolute accuracy in industrial manipulators remains difficult because rigid-body kinematic calibration cannot fully represent configuration-dependent non-geometric effects. Drawing inspiration from biological brain-body co-adaptation, this study presents an Evolutionary Neuro-Physical Hybrid (Evo-NPH) framework in which rigid geometric parameters and neural compensator weights are treated as a single co-evolving decision vector. In the offline phase, a Dual-Strategy Adaptive Differential Evolution (DS-ADE) optimizer performs global joint identification using complementary exploration-exploitation behaviors and success-history inheritance, analogous to morphology-control co-evolution in biological systems. In the online phase, a Neuro-Physical Hybrid Jacobian (NPHJ) solver augments the analytical Jacobian with gradients from a Graph Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (GKAN), enabling sensorimotor-like real-time compensation on the learned physical manifold. Experiments on an ABB IRB 120 manipulator with 600 configurations (500 training, 100 testing) report a testing distance-residual RMSE of 0.62 mm, STD of 0.59 mm, and MAX of 0.83 mm. Relative to the uncalibrated baseline, RMSE is reduced by 86.75%; compared with the strongest published baseline, RMSE improves by 23.46%. Ablation results show that joint DS-ADE optimization outperforms a sequential pipeline by 32.6%, and the graph-structured KAN outperforms a parameter-matched MLP by 26.2%. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests (p<0.001) confirm statistical significance.