Robots being developed to retrieve library books

It's all part of the dream to make robots more practical. After all, robots are interesting demonstrations of technology, but if they can't be helpful to the rest of us, they'll never succeed commercially. So robotics engineers are hard at work teaching these machines how to do things that save time for humans: Roomba sweeps floors, hospital robots shuttle supplies for health care workers, and industrial robots assemble cars. So why not have a robot that grabs library books for you?

Of course, you wouldn't need a robot at all if all the library books were scanned and loaded into an ebook format. But that would anger book publishers, who don't even seem to like the idea of public libraries these days. (It's all that darned sharing!)

• The prototype has cameras, sensors and grippers so it can locate and collect a book.
• The hope is that one day teams of service robots could work in libraries.
• The main issue with deploying service robots outside of the factory to work in domains surrounded by people has been one of safety, explained Professor Angel del Pobil.
• Mixing robots and humans in an unstructured, uncontrolled environment, where there all manner of obstacles to negotiate, could have unpredictable results.
• Professor Pobil thinks libraries are the best place to start introducing robots into public spaces, or at least to start showing that the technology is possible and works.
• "A library is a semi-structured environment," Professor Pobil told BBC News Online.
• The robot is a mobile manipulator which means that it is a vehicle with three wheels, Professor Pobil explained.
• It has an arm with seven joints, two fingers which form a gripper, and two micro cameras on its wrist.
• Four sensors built into its gripper senses the force it is applying.
• When it receives a request for a book, its voice recognition software matches the titles with the book's classification code in the database.
• Because the database will only give an approximate location, the robot will navigate its way to the bookshelf, using its infrared and laser guidance system, and scan books within a four-metre radius.
• "It can read the labels and the position of the book using its image processing and optical character recognition software," the professor said.
• He does not imagine that at any stage they will be replacing librarians and demanding payment for overdue books, however.