Slashdot Mirror
Marian The Robot Librarian
nusratt writes "BBC reports on robotics researchers in Spain, who have developed a prototype which can retrieve books from library shelves while patrons are present. 'When it receives a request for a book, its voice recognition software matches the titles with the book's classification code to identify which bookshelf stack to go to. The robot navigates its way to the bookshelf, using its infrared and laser guidance system, and scans books within a four-metre radius. Once the book is located, it has to grasp it and take it off the bookshelf, which is not a simple as it might seem. For this, the team had to develop special fingertips like nails, with one nail longer than the other. 'For me that was the hardest part. All the other things were current state of the art technology,' said Professor Pobil.' The article also discusses using robots to assist in digitizing library materials."
I can understand the tech behind this that's cool, but is it something we really need? What will the humans be doing, drinking cokes and eating some pizza? we're big enough already, I'd rather see tech going to improve the antiquated dewey decimal system.
HFCB$
free ipod and free gmail!
"The robot navigates its way to the bookshelf, using its infrared and laser guidance system, and scans books within a four-metre radius. Once the book is located, it has to grasp it and take it off the bookshelf, which is not a simple as it might seem. For this, the team had to develop special fingertips like nails, with one nail longer than the other.
So basically, Marian is equipped for both finding and killing.
I find it hilarious the robots are always made with features which would help them to kill humans if they were to turn evil.
This sounds like it could be really useful for managing archives. I know in Oxford they have a library called the Bod which has several miles of bookshelves underground as it has a copy of everything that has been published in the UK, but if you want somthing that isn't in the publicly accessable parts you need to order it and wait for the old bloke to take the bod train underground and get it for you, which can take a while. I envisage an underground colony of these little robots going about, organising things, retrieving books with a great increase in efficiency.
May be an ape might be a better librarian? ;)
This might actually be a good use for RFID, or something similar.
It seems like once the robot gets to the bookshelf it needs to look in per the database, it does a very, very inefficient search book-by-book.
Could this perhaps be a good use (imagine that) for RFID? It seems that some sort of radio tags on books would help the robot localize the book a bit more and speed up the searches.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Nice, but only if you know what you are looking for. If all the books are scanned first, you can google them.
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
"It can read the labels and the position of the book using its image processing and optical character recognition software," the professor said.
Wouldn't it be easier just to RFID-tag the books, or give them barcodes on the spine, or otherwise modify them in some way to facilitate the robot's work? I have a sneaking suspicion that either of those would be faster and more reliable than trying to OCR book titles or call-number tags, albeit less "clever". "Clever" solutions that are less functional than more straighforward solutions don't particularly impress me, and I doubt I'm alone on this.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
We're now that much closer to making Space Quest I a reality. Anyone remember that robot at the beginning of the game, when the ship's falling apart? I bet they had that game in mind when they were designing this robot.
You forget to fill in the "dept" text box form field for this story.
We have proof at this screenshot that our team just took of the story.
Please MODERATE THIS POST UP so that it can be fixed and read our latest journals.
If you liked my post,
Out sourcing is bad, therefore, the government should ban robots to protect us from robots taking our jobs. Oh wait, robots are taking librarian jobs and since it doesn't affect most slashdotters, they should go ahead and replace the librarians with robots. The government should hold off on banning of the robots until they do a massive take over of IT jobs since it will cause unemployment of the geeks and cause major economic harm.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
First off, the technology is years off from now. Who will fund the advanced research?
Exactly, stop all research. Who on earth will fund it?!?! Looks like they already have *some* funding, and if this article gets enough interest it may create *more* funding.
Libraries should be worried about actually getting our fine young brains to start reading. Most kids these days watch movies, play videogames involving stealing cars, killing cops, and fucking prostitutes, and eat fast food.
Is this the Libraries' fault or the parents? Perhaps parents should take their kids to the Library more instead of letting their kids play so many violent video games (assuming such a problem exists).
Finally, we need a better browsing mechanism. I use the Web for most of my research because browsing is easy (after all, we have Web BROWSERS). But in libraries, it's just not feasible anymore these days.
Heaven forbid you actually have to do real research instead of just a google search. Google is a great tool, but there's a lot of value in being able to look through a series of reference materials and decide which one has the best information. Unfortunately, this is becoming some what of a dieing art. How will we teach programmers how binary search works if they never open a dicitionary/encyclopedia/phone book anymore but instead just always google it? All the best examples are running by the way side.
Enjoy your Saturday morning.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Couldn't they have just outfitted the fingertips with a vacuum just powerful enough to be able to pull the book so that safer, rubber fingertips could be used, instead of 'nail' fingertips?
... such robots could help children and people with handicaps and paralysis find the books they want to read or can't reach on the shelves. Would be better if it didn't have to go check the data base every time a request was made though. For example if you could point to a book or tell the title of one you're looking at on the shelf, but can't reach, it would be better if the robot could just grab it for you, than have to access the data base, and scan, and all that other stuff.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
yes, girls read /. too...
I need to relieve the burning of my loins !!!
I work at Powells, a massive bookstore in Oregon. Some of us make light over the fact that we are slowly becoming an extremely corporate entity, and that we are reaching a horrid level of 'Barnes & Nobelization'. At this point someone always chimes in and makes a joke about how we will soon have automated bookstore employees, and maybe a drive-through window. Not so funny anymore.
I have to admit that this sounds cool. I just wonder what this thing would do with the masses of people who come in and say "Yeah, I'm looking for that big red book...You know, the one that was mentioned on the radio this morning...I think it has 'God' in the title..." Hehe. Good luck. I can't tell you how many times people come in and have no clue about the book they want, they have some concept of maybe the size, or the approx. year, or maybe simply a small bit of the plot. I don't think the communication that takes place between a knowledgeable book geek and a person looking for just that right book can ever be fully replaced.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
"New library robot will help patrons find books, Sarah Connor"
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I hate automated systems like this. When I am looking for a book on a certain subject I like to browse through all the adjacent books to see what I may be missing.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I can't help but be reminded of this episode of Dexter's Laboratory, where Dexter is placed in charge of the school library.
After discovering an out of place "Green Eggs and Ham" book, he creates a fleet of flying robots to manage the library. When these robots can't find a particular book, he has to look for it himself, destroying the library in the process.
... for those who want to have time to read a novel while the robot librarian goes in search of your requested book. Fetch rover! Give it a challenge like War and Peace.
Way to publically display your account email you fucking dipshit retard!
has to grasp it and take it off the bookshelf, which is not a simple as it might seem.
Well, considering how long it takes for a child to learn to take out a book from a bookshelf, without ripping out all the pages, I hope there's some understanding of the complicated process of learning a machine to handle physical objects. Not just mechanically, but adapting sensor data to the real world can be really hard.
I'm sorry, no food allowed while on-duty in the robot servicing area. What was your question again?
I think it would be more useful to have a robot that put the books back.
that robots are being made wimpy like this.
What an embarrassment to the robot community to go from finding Sarah Connor to finding some twits copy of The Cat in the Hat.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
for a robot to turn 'evil' first you have to have genuine AI, and then you have to define evil for robots.
is evolution 'evil'?.
if species A overwhelms species B it's not EVIL.. even if one is mechanical and one is organic.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
P.S. Oooook!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Could it scan all the pages and send a eBook to /sorry a robot ate my homework/
me in a remote location? Stored in eLibrary for future requests of course.
But only if you're unwilling to retrain when a robot takes your job. Lets say these robots learn to stock shelves at grocery stores in the wee hours of the morning. Prices of food are going to go down a bunch because one robot working tirelessly through the night will be able to do the job of many people. I really think this could happen after the strikes we're recently had in California. So people lose jobs, check out luddite on wikipedia. It's going to get weird when a giant corporation consists of one rich guy and 1000 robots. Go progressive taxation!
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
...would have been "I, Librarian".
I know, I know, *Groooooan*. Fine, that wasn't very funny.
But then, neither is the fact that these will be the main characters in future librarian-based sexual fantasies. Frightening...
Sure. But, as Will Smith has shown us, all robots are inherently evil and will eventually turn against their masters in an orgy of blood and violence. It'll start simple: You'll request William Gibson, and it'll bring you DebbieGibson. Then, you'll request "Through the Looking Glass" and it THROWS you through the looking glass! It'll happen!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Have barcoded boxes on the shelves. Put the books in the boxes. No need to rfid or barcode the actual books. It could be done with existing technology.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It is a major activity at most libraries to take the books that have just been checked back in and put them back on the shelf...somewhat the opposite of what this robot is automating. I am not quite sure that libraries would be interested in a book retriever, but the market for a book 'filer' would seem to be obvious. Indeed, this seems to fall under the general category of automated inventory systems. Libraries, however, may be a poor choice to try to automate simply because their business model is to provide a free service to the public. Most of them are too poor to afford this kind of equipment. They would probably spend their budget on books rather than robots. If ever there were to be an automated book inventory system, I would expect to see it at a major (profitable) book store chain first.
That robot is not a librarian... It should really be called a "Robot Page" since that is title of the position who puts the books back on the shelves. For this to really be a librarian, it would have to know how to find you that rare quote you wanted for your thesis, or suggest a good novel for you to read next.
I get so irritated when people dissect my career and believe that all we do is put books on shelves. I don't do that. I do a million other things, from research to coding web pages in PHP, but I do not shelve books.
Reasons why you should fall down and worship your librarian
Hmm, you'd think that Nails would damage the book, eh? Or at least scratch it up some. Unless, of course, they are used for something else.
I find it very interesting how far our robotics have gone so far. Many people think that it could have gone a lot further, but I'm not really sure. After all, we do have that automatic oven now. Sure, it's not a robot, but I think I'd rather have it over a robot that grabs my book for me. I have legs and a card catalog! But I'm not a senior citizen... so I guess they'd rather have both. Hah.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
These "librarians" can fetch your books, but they can't translate your research premises into the language of the stacks, or stand up for your privacy against the Patriot Act. These robots will be good for automating human librarians, freeing more of their time to talk with us about facilitating our research, and innovating ways to improve our society's access to our offline data layer.
--
make install -not war
When I am looking through the Stacks for something; I like to scope out the other books in the Sections.
Will the Robot be attracted to books by their shapes, fragments of glimpsed Titles, or other Human and Individual filetering techniques. I have found the most interesting books, quite by accident. Sometimes you are cruising through the stacks and see a big, dusty old Tome, and you cannot pass it by. You pull it down and leaf through it. Maybe you do not check it out, but it causes a train of thought, and then zip... you are moving to a new section, looking for something you thought of while looking at the Dusty old Book. A chain of events not set into motion by the Library Retrieval System.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
But I don't think it's so good for the regular Joe. Looking up the Dewy number on a PC is fine, but getting the book should be a 'live' experience.
I believe a very rough approximation of this (automated book retrieval) was tried in that big-ugly library in paris.
It sucked.
Now all they need to do is build a robot to reshelve the books - that is the hardest part!
It's almost just like that thing in The Confusion.
Putting books back is tougher, and will probably require a more complex system, with one manipulator to open up a space for the book and another to put the book into place.
Can it find Sarah Connor?
Why grasp the sides of the book? I thought the easiest way would be to grab the top of the spine and pull back and down. Maybe a forklift on the bottom and a sort of hook on the top to grab the spine at the top and bottom.
Grabbing the sides seems frought with problems, ie. Books too tightly packed, pincers cant get in between books or pinch books either too hard, dimpling the covers, or not hard enough, dropping books.
It might be more practical to reduce the problem to a simpler one by sticking RDID tags in all the books, but this is research and the point is to do something new. A robot that can find books on the shelf is one step closer to a robot that can find anything you want in a jumble of stuff. A robot that can find RFIDs is 1990's technology...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Be watching for Marian in next summer's box office blockbuster, I, Librarian
My wife is a librarian of the human persuasion. Taking books off the shelf is an insignificant part of working the public service side of the library. Does the robot librarian deal with patrons that urinate/crap in the elevators, lay down in the aisles to look up women's skirts, kick twelve year old boys off the Internet terminals for looking at porn, kick fifty year old men off the Internet terminals for looking at porn...? More importantly, how does a robot librarian deal with a patron that wants a book but can't articulate what it is they're looking for? Or believes that the book with green binding they checked out two years ago is enough of a description--OK, the robot may excel in that area.
This could be a great tool for libraries, as long as the design team solves that whole "crying makes the robot librarian's head explode" issue.
In other news, a recall of robotic groundskeepers was announced after two were immolated upon hearing their master, Hugh, had found his true love in college student Lisa Simpson.
If anyone here has ever worked in a library, it's
obvious that the wrong problem was picked.
If a robot could re-shelve books, in exactly the
right place, that would be huge. Better than
automatic teller machines, in terms of
eliminating human drudgery.
Second best, would be something that tells you if
anyone is in any corner of the library, so you
don't have to prowl the whole thing looking
for people, when you want to turn off the lights
and go home.
Rfid tagging would be nice. At the instant a book
is "checked out", the exit gate is notified, so
it doesn't alarm when you walk out with the book.
eliminate putting all those magnetic strips
into the books people want to steal, and having
to magnetize/demagnetize them all the time.
and I suggest we all read Kurt Vonnegut's, Player Piano, again.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Ok something off-topic is being dredged up from my deepest earliest childhood memories. Some children's reading show on PBS with Marian the Librarian. She had a machine she'd put objects in and a book would come out the other end.
"There took place this curious chase through meadow, tree, and flower. Til at last they ended up right at the witch's tower. So now Marian the Librarian, a prisoner she'll stay, until the witch is happy and lets Marian go away."
WTF am I thinking of?
"I'm sorry, but that volume has been deleted from the Jedi Archives."
Good point about digitizing, you could unleash a team of wifi enabled autonomous robots into a library and come back a few days later and everything would be digitized, saved and put back where it was found. The CIA should also develop this technology to allow them to covertley and remotley scan sensitive meterials and put them back exactly as there were found and leave little to no evidice behind.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
jebus, this is a waste of tech. Why invent things to keep the dead tree format alive? Take all the money and time and just digitize all the books. Plug in terminal and let people read all the books at will. Hell for the ammount of money it costs to buy dead trees, ship and store them you could just print on demand DVD's and save money in the end. Using Tech to keep us in the 15th century is just lame.
Once I went to a library (like this one) that wouldn't let you look at the books...you had to tell a person what book you wanted, and they got it for you.
When I goto a library, I am not always sure the title of the book I want...usually I just go to the appropriate section, and look through the books until I find one that is good. Seeing the title in a card catalogue is not enough to help me decide what I want.
In that library, I really annoyed the workers because I kept asking for books, then returning them immediately.
Qxe4
As one of those anarchist librarians mentioned yesterday, I'm not worried about this robot. As another librarian said on a list yesterday, "Calling a robot a librarian makes as much sense as calling a pill-dispensing robot a doctor."
Wouldn't it be faster to just print the book on the spot for you?
Books on demand
Let me know when they make Marvin the paranoid librarian android.
I like to post in articles nobody's moderating any more to boost my karma.
Robo-librarian grinds away and comes back with something like .. English Birds
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
1. The sole purpose of the costly and time consuming task of assigning call numbers to books is to enable browsing the shelves for similar materials. In libraries with closed stacks, where pages, runners, or even robots, pull books by request of the reader (such as the Library of Congress, the British Library, the NYPL on 5th Ave.) there is no point at all in putting on call numbers. In fact it's a complete waste of money.
2. Amazon does not assign call numbers and it doesn't need them to pull a book. Amazon does not have a cataloging backlog like every library does. Every book has an ISDN number today and every book, journal, serial and monograph retailed today has a bar code on the wrapper.
3. This is really of value (if it works at all) as an order fulfillment system in any warehouse. I would venture to suggest that FedEx, UPS, DHL, most any mail order business and even the postal service have developed better ways of order-picking, retrieving a uniquely numbered item than using voice recognition (for an infinite number of different speakers) and a dinky robot running up and down the stacks.
No wonder Spain is so little known for it's brain surgery, rocket science, or advanced technology.
A fun exercise I try to employ a lot is to take something and imagine the exact opposite of it (or to imagine it in reverse; not necessarily like playing the tape backwards, but thinking about whether the parts would make as much sense backwards as forwards) -- and I'm often surprised at just how much more useful the opposite of something seems than the original thing itself (of course, maybe I'm just suffering from an as-yet-unidentified problem...)
Anyway, it occurs to me that the real value in a robotic-library-book-manipulator would be not in the retrieval of books but in the return of books to the shelves! I live in (actually, just outside) a smallish college town where the local public library website shows "only" about 311,000 items checked-out during the current fiscal year (ongoing), but I know a significant amount of their resources (staff, paid and otherwise; -- they report 3,050 hours of "volunteer" service during the same period) are eaten by the labor involved in returning books to their "homes" on the shelves; something that could do that even semi-automatically might save large libraries millions (and might just outright save some of the smaller ones) every year.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.