Remote-Controlled Robot Could Browse The Stacks

An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese team of researchers has developed a robot that could help browse for books in a library by receiving instructions via the Internet, a team member said Friday. The robot, a wheeled vehicle measuring 50 by 45 centimeters with a digital camera, mechanical hand and arm, follows orders received through the Internet." This reminds me somewhat of Sonoma State University's (quite different) system profiled a few years ago in Wired.

It runs Linux

[NonaMyous]

More details here: original pdf [tsukuba.ac.jp], converted html [google.com].

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[account_deleted]

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Needless robots...

[feelyoda]

I love robots (i work in robotics), but this is a waste. Clearly, digitizing the text is a faster and easier solution. A clever hack at CMU for such a project was used to solve the problem of turning pages. Pull too hard, and the page rips. Push and more than one page goes for the ride. Solution: silly (or thinking) putty! It sticks to the page perfectly, i.e. it lets go when it should. This is an example of coming up with a solution to a given problem. A mobile robot that needs to perceive its environment, make local decisions, take up space, incur battery power, etc. is just making more problems and solving nothing. It is creating problems, though you get some wow-effects along the way.

Re:Of *course*. The *Internet*.

[Tenebrious1]

Let me ask you something. Why go through all the trouble to design, build, and debug a digital camera wielding box of bolts with a D-Link wireless Internet gateway jammed up its rear just so homebound people can visit the library, when existing technology known as "scanners" and "permanent storage" could store and make available every book in that library on the Internet? Not only that, there would be no queue to use the freaking robot, and the robot wouldn't be running over human library browsers' toes. Oh, "scanners" and "permanent storage" aren't experimental technologies either. Hmm!!!

Why doesn't Amazon.com have scanned pages of all the books they sell? Maybe because it'll take a dozen years and millions of dollars to scan in all those pages? Maybe because the authors don't want scanned images of their books online in the first place? Maybe because having a full book in digital form doesn't fall under fair use rules?

Yeah, it'd be fantastic to have every book online, available at any time, not low definition images of pages. But I suspect it'll be cheaper to buy a robot that can fill queued requests during the night, rather than scan in every single book that's available. Once there's a central repository of books where every library could reference requests, then you won't need the robot, but until copyright laws change and all the books are online, the robot is probably the cheaper solution.

That's nothing

[Pflipp]

Around the sixties, the Library of the Delft University of Technology had a "bibliofoon" system, where people could find the books they want in a catalog and then enter their number in the ordering system. A red light would start burning at the right shell, and personnel would start taking the order.

Once arrived at the right spot, they would get the ordered book and put it on a large spiral slide that was central to the building. This slide was connected to a sliding table ("lopende band", how does that translate?) which ended up in the catalog room, so that people could take their books and check them out.

The most fun part about this system was that people would keep the slide clean by simply taking a slide :-) Must have been marvellous.