A camera calibration technique based on controllable rotation for active vision system is proposed. The camera is controlled to rotate a known angle around (or around nearby) the optical center to calculate the accurate equivalent focus length departed from other parameters. This method needs two rotations to get the equivalent focus lengths along two axes. Using the simplified imaging model,that two equivalent focus lengths are set to equal and the principal point is on image center,only one rotation is required to get the linear camera parameters. And then a camera calibration method combined by controllable rotation and traditional two steps calibration is put forward to get all parameters including the distortion coefficients. Experiments show that the use of camera parameters obtained by calibration method based on the controlled rotation has a high accuracy for pose measurement.