(2 June 2016) Computer systems have helped catalogue libraries for decades, but if some reckless reader has put a book back in the wrong spot, it’s a daunting task for librarians to search the entire building for it – but not for robotic librarians. Researchers at Singapore’s A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research are designing robots that can self-navigate through libraries at night, scanning spines and shelves to report back on missing or out-of-place books.
This autonomous robotic shelf-scanning (AuRoSS) platform scans RFID tags on the books and produces a report. In the morning, the human librarians can check the results and can easily see which books are in the wrong spot and where they belong. There’s still a need for human labor, but it’s far less time-consuming than manually searching every shelf for misplaced titles.
Read the full article by Michael Irving.
