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The librarian robot that finds misplaced books but doesn’t tidy them up

Distracted visitors, messy books, bored librarians are the characterizing elements of many of the public libraries we all know. The computerized book lending system partly reduces the risk of mispositioning of volumes on the shelves, but readers who take down all the books from the collective imagination available for consultation almost never put them back in the right place.

A project has started from Singapore that could soon facilitate the work of all the librarians in the world, or almost all: some researchers from A Star Research have built the prototype of a robot (AuRoSS) that wanders around the library shelves at night – the principle is that of the robot vacuum cleaner, so to speak – and which, by scanning the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) code containing all the information on each volume, is able to find misplaced books . The man, still necessary, will only have to view the data the following morning and do the reorganization.

Among the risks of AuRoSS is the possibility that it will hit the shelves, causing everything to collapse: “if the robot is too far away the RFID signal will be lost, if it gets too close the antenna will hit the shelf” explains Renjun Li, one of the researchers. To overcome the problem they decided to “detect the surfaces of each shelf and use them as a guide to plan the routes”. AuRoSS has been tested in some libraries in Singapore achieving 99% movement and analysis accuracy.

An idea so simple that it appears banal, but which should reduce the margin of human error to a minimum, even if no technology can prevent the distracted librarian from misplacing a book.

Source: Cultora.it

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