Industrial robot arms are extensively important for intelligent manufacturing. An industrial robot arm commonly enjoys its high repetitive positioning accuracy while suffering from its low absolute positioning accuracy, which greatly restricts its application in high-precision manufacture, like automobile manufacture. Aiming at addressing this hot issue, this work proposes a novel robot arm calibration method based on cubic interpolated beetle antennae search (CIBAS). This study has three ideas: a) developing a novel CIBAS algorithm, which can effectively addresses the issue of local optimum in a Beetle Antennae Search algorithm; b) utilizing a particle filter to reduce the influence of non-Gaussian noises; and c) proposing a new calibration method incorporating CIBAS algorithm and particle filter to searching the optimal kinematic parameters. Experimental results on an ABB IRB120 industrial robot arm demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much higher calibration accuracy than several state-of-the-art calibration methods.