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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."
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."
Nono, don't jump to conclusions...what makes you think the robots won't be able to access a constantly-changing database recording, among other things, the locations of the books? They just need to give every book slot numbered
I'm wary of using the term RFID...I think it gives the American government too many boners.
The point of these systems is to work in an unenhanced environment, one which humans can use just as effectively. For example, robots used to drive around on "virtual" tracks (markers on the ground). That worked fine but it meant that someone had to deploy the markers and whenever something moved, the markers had to be changed accordingly. A robot which can use the same information by which humans navigate a library can be deployed without preparing its surroundings and without the potential of a mismatch between human-readable information and machine-readable information.