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

[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 :-)

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)

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.