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.

Comments

Robot Labor

[Raindance]

Great idea, but grad students are still cheaper. :)

RD

Re:Robot Labor

[TwoBit]

I can see the denial of service attacks already: hundreds of computers all direct bots to get the same book, with the result being a crowded and deadlocked hallway of stuck robots.

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.

Re:Robot Labor

[dreadnougat]

Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and generally better to use RFID tags on the books, and then some lowly student like me who's trying to pay his ever rising tuition to file the books?

Just something short ranged, so it won't track you out of the library.

Or do I not know what I'm talking about?

Re:Robot Labor

[RealProgrammer]

and undergrads are cheaper still.

But you have to teach them to read first, so it's a wash.

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

and so it begins

[Anonymous Coward]

First they get our books, then they become our librarians, people don't return their books on time and no one pays their overdue fine and the robots get mad at us...

...and that's how it begins

*sigh*

[WesG]

And I thought I was cool when I found my book using the Dewey Decimal System :-)

Dude - go for undergraduates!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pay them much less and they could be more attractive!

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.

Takes the fun out of the library

[Brataccas]

Maybe I'm just too much of a geek...but this robot takes all the fun out of going to the library. When I need to find information on a subject, I find the general area and then leaf through as many related books as I can. Gives you a much better overview of the subject to see it from different perspectives, you discover new ideas and relationships to other subjects.

Bah! In my day, we actually read the books...and we LIKED it!

It runs Linux

[NonaMyous]

More details here: original pdf, converted html.

the REAL reason for this robot

[nxs212]

The real reason for building this robot was to catch students making out in the basment. (most libraries' stacks are in the basement where the lights are low and access is limited to staff and few lucky/adventurous types)
When I was in HS I worked at a library and stacks was my favorite area. One time I heard noise in the far corner and went to investigate. I was clumsy stepped on something on the way there - really cute catholic schoolgirl and my metalhead friend (who also worked there) emerged. Needless to say, both looked embarrassed. They made up some lame excuse and left. Now if I had that robot, I probably would have had the whole thing on tape :)
1. All the good stuff is in the basement.
2. Catholic schoolgirls are WAY pervy.
3. Women are turned ON more if there's a chance of getting caught.
4. Having long hair and playing metal in your car could actually get you laid! (in the 80s)

Roaming the Stacks

[mr_lithic]

University Stacks are more than just a way of storing books. They are great method of researching.

The fact that standard organisational systems (Dewey or Library of Congress)are employed in all university libraries makes the job so much easier.

If you want to find research materials on North American Indians of the Plains. Instead of looking in a card catalogue, you would get yourself up to the "E" Stacks and roam around the 78's to 99's. Easy.

Sometimes, I think that Librarians have more to tell us about organising information than we have to tell them.

Re:Needless robots...

[Tenebrious1]

Clearly, digitizing the text is a faster and easier solution.

Well, you'll need some expensive equipment to digitize an entire library. The fastest way is to rip the books apart, and feed all the pages into a fast scanner. No problem, unless you want to use the books again. Most of the books in libraries are expensive, out of print books, so you probably don't want to destroy them. Clearly this option is out.

So you're left with scanning by hand. This is an arduous process. Especially for larger books, pages are difficult to scan properly thanks to the binding. It will take a hundred years to do this by hand. Because the sloppy scanning, OCR is a nightmare; so you'll have to either spend another century correcting the OCR, or leaving the pages as sloppy images. Neither sounds appealing.

Suppose you've done it, and put every book online. Now you hire lawyers to protect you from the publishers and authors who's work you copied and distributed illegally and are now suing you. As this is Japan, you'll apologize for putting the university in such a shameful position and resign in disgrace, never to work again. Your children will be ostricized in school and will hate you for it.

The robot is a much better solution.

We only need it once.

[blair1q]

Program it to read all of the books and upload them to an online server.

Then it can retire and take up a hobby, like infinite looping or virus collecting.