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.

Just have the robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Scan the books into computers (or itself), and then we have no more need for the actual book.

Re:Robot Labor

[LostCluster]

Yes, but one of the greatest problems in large libraries is when a checked-in book gets placed on a shelf other than the one it belongs on. A needle in the haystack situation results.

Robot book-searchers means that the stacks can be nearly completely closed to human access, since a failed robot delivery is far more likely to result in a book being placed out of bounds where it will stand out than neatly placed in the wrong pile, and even then the discrepancy would soon be discovered when the robot discovers n+1 books in a pile the computer records say it should only be finding n books.

They might not be cheaper, but they certainly would be more accurate and dramatically cut the risk of books being lost within a library.

Help "browse"???

[Tenebrious1]

That's interesting. I love browsing for books... walking along the racks just looking at the titles and picking out those which sound interesting. Only problem, you're walking with your head tilted, which gets sore after a few minutes.

It'd be cool to have the robot walk along and you'd see the image rotated 90 degrees, and the tiles scrolling by. Heck it'd be nice to get that on a video at the end of the aisle so you wouldn't have to go into the crowded aisle itself.

Libraries are where RFID tags will really shine. The robot wouldn't need a camera, just run run along the shelf with a sensor until it picks up the right tag. As for placing a book in the wrong place, smart bookshelves that read the RFID and record all the books that are there, and report any that are out of place.

Re:Just have the robot

[Eberlin]

You may not have a NEED for the actual book but there's always going to be people who prefer a hardcopy of something. There's something about having to wait for something to boot, fire up a reader, then scroll or click through pages that could possibly turn off a few users.

I know it's an overused cliche but I'll use it anyway -- it's a bit cumbersome to sit under a tree for hours reading from a laptop. Books should always be a cool thing.

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

[Tenebrious1]

Why is it important to stress that the robot receives orders through the Internet?

If you read the article (which is only two paragraphs long, is it too much to ask people to read a two paragraph article?), you find it was designed to be used by people who cannot physically access the library. The robot finds the books, opens the books, flips through pages and sends the images back over the internet to the person who for some reason is housebound. That person can then request the book be sent to them. So yeah, the internet plays an important role here.

Re:Robot Labor

[Phat_Tony]

This is a really impotant issue. I used to go to the University of Chicago, and a friend there who worked in the library (Regenstein) told be they think that as much as 5% of the collection cold be missing due to mis-shelving. Millions of dollars worth of books. They try to audit the shelves one by one to find these, but it takes them something like 20 years to do a full circuit on the book-by-book auditing at the rate they go. At least that's what he told me, don't know if it's true.

What I do know is true is a guy in my dorm who was a complete asshole who used to have a job at the library reshelving books, and every day he'd go in, check out his cart of books to return, and ditch all of them in any space he could find on the nearest shelves, and leave. He got paid for 2 hours of reshelving a day for this. All those books will be lost for up to twenty years. They'll show that they're in, until someone goes to try to find one. He single handedly lost thousands of books from the collection. -Phat Tony

Re:Why not just scan?

[Rev Saxon]

Lets just assume that each book has say...500 pages. Now, thats 500 million pages to be scanned, even moving at the rate of a page a second, the equates to roughly 951 years.

Re:Just have the robot

[bigberk]

Scan the books into computers (or itself), and then we have no more need for the actual book.

I'm one of the biggest geeks out there, and electrical engineering is my life but I still know that printed books are very valuable. Just how long does digital media last? CDRs, 5 years. How about digital memory, like PROM - 50+ years. And what guarantees that we will still have the tools to easily read these even 20 years from now?

Paper books are awesome. Although it's not typical in a library, you could find a century-old book and read it. If it degrades there is still mostly legible information. The data is not destroyed by impact, large electromagnetic fields (including nuclear/EM bomb) and the data can be wired directly to our brains via the eyes.

Books are pretty friggin' neat.

Re:Robot Labor

[bhima]

Good use for RFID. Then the book is never lost as long as it is in the building. And it could be self repairing. If the robot wanders by a book out of place it simply returns the book to the proper place.

shelfreading

[js7a]

Typical work-study students can shelf-read at around two feet per minute. If only one student is working shelfreading 2 hours per day, that's 1,200 shelf-feet per week, or 36,000 shelf-feet per academic year. U. Chicago holds 7 million volumes, so 20 years is about what that one 10 hr/wk job would take.

Sheesh, which is worse: lazy work-study students that don't reshelve properly, or a university administration that holds lavish parties for professors with huge salaries, but doesn't hire more than one 1/4-time shelf-reader at a time?

Re:Robot Labor

[Illbay]

Um, why not just spend the money on rendering all these volumes into "eBooks"?