How About A Robot Librarian For The Repetitive Stuff?

Robotic Librarian Finds Lost Books, Won't Tell You to Shush

A mobile robotic system is in development to take over the menial job of patrolling the stacks and inventorying the books

Michelle Starr | June 6, 2016

Every job has its more boring components. In libraries, one of those jobs is scanning the shelves, looking for missing and misplaced books, and taking stock of what's available. For human workers, this is time-consuming, repetitive and boring, all of which can contribute to wandering attention.
The autonomous robotic shelf-scanning platform, or AuRoSS, is in development by the Institute for Infocomm Research of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. It uses laser mapping to navigate a library, and RFID tags placed on books to scan the collection. It can work at night, tracking the shelves in real-time to locate lost and missing books, with 99 percent scanning accuracy, even with curved shelves.

"System optimized for library application. Can be extended to other type of scanning and sensing." Source:  http://www.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/sites/default/files/info-sheets/Robot%20Assisted%20Scanning%20and%20Analytics.pdf

<more at http://www.cnet.com/news/robotic-librarian-finds-lost-books-wont-tell-you-to-shush/; related articels and links: http://www.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/sites/default/files/info-sheets/Robot%20Assisted%20Scanning%20and%20Analytics.pdf (Robot-assisted Scanning and Analytics. [n.d.]) and http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7354246 (AuRoSS: An Autonomous Robotic Shelf Scanning system. Renjun Li, Zhiyong Huang, Ernest Kurniawan and Chin Keong Ho. Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on; Sept. 28 2015-Oct. 2 2015, pages 6100-6105. [Abstract: Tracking of items on shelves is an important but time-consuming task in inventory control. In particular, books in public libraries are frequently borrowed and returned, even misplaced, and proves a challenge to be tracked on a daily basis. To track the books efficiently, we propose the Autonomous Robotic Shelf Scanning (AuRoSS) system. This paper elaborates on the key enabling robotic technology for the fully autonomous system, namely, a navigation system with surface tracking capability. A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader is carried by the navigation system to identify the RFID tags embedded in each book. Based on the tag information, a tracking report that highlights missing and misplaced books is generated for the end users. To ensure successful identification, the surface tracking requires high accuracy, for which we propose a filtered Hough transform and a macro-mini manipulator structure. Tests of the AuRoSS system in a library show high accuracy in the scanning performance.])>