Abstract: There are a number of factors which may contribute to robot position error. For industrial application, it is reasonable to have high position precision on a few work points instead of having high precisionall over the work space that may be costly. This paper presents a method of calibrating and compensatingfor the positioning error of robot manipulator in working area. A new objective coordinate transformationmatrix is established based on robot position calibration. A relatively simple algorithm is developed forcompensating position error in subarea within the robot envelope. Simulation results show that the positioning accuracy of a robot manipulator can be substantially improved in calibrated points and small areaaround. It is a simple and realistic way to synthetically compensate robot position errors in finite workingpoints.