A practical way to achieve machine tool drive system accuraey is througn corn-pensation in the position control loop. various strategies have been deueloped inwhich the compensation data are stored either in a'computer or by aiternattve techniques. The approach described in thispaper demonstrates how the dominant causes of the inaccuracies in machine tool drive systems cart be determlned in a simple and straightforward manner and how the compensation ta can be generated using a microprocessor-based calibration technique. The proposed method was demonstrated On a Giddings & Lewis Mode, 10V Numericenter and consists of three major steps: accura measurement, 21 error-map represen-tation, and3、error-mmap analysis anderror cause diagnosis. Accuracy measurement was accomplished by reading both the resolver counts and the output of a laser interferometer which serifedas a reference (master) scale. The heprocedure is basea on a strategy in which smal, 0.5mm(0.020 in.), highly accurate±2.5 tan (4±0.0001 in.)linear displacements ofthe machine tool table motion are taken as the measurement reference. An ARMA (Autoregressive Moving Average) model of order (16,/5) isthestatistically adequatemode, thatfitthedata of the Pangular displacement of theresolver. TheDynamicDataSystem techniquewasused, this purpose and it can also be used to represent the error-map function. A spectral analysis of the ARMA model revealed the sources of the kinematic errors