Transforming library operation with robotics

Some years ago, in the context of a project titled "the UJI librarian robot", the UJI Robotic Intelligence Lab developed a robotic mobile manipulator that was able to autonomously locate a book in an ordinary library, and grasp it from a bookshelf, by using eye-in-hand stereo vision and force sensing. The robot was composed of a robot arm mounted on top of a mobile vehicle, and was only provided with the book code, a library map and some knowledge about its logical structure. The system took advantage of the spatio-temporal constraints and regularities of the library environment by applying disparate techniques such as stereo vision, visual tracking, probabilistic matching, optical character recognition, motion estimation, multisensor-based grasping, visual servoing and hybrid control, in such a way that it exhibited a robust and dependable performance. The system was tested, and experimental results showed how it was able to robustly locate and grasp a book in a reasonable time without human intervention. A second version of the system was developed later enhancing the robot capabilities by replacing the parallel-jaw gripper with a three-finger hand, so that book extraction was just one among many possible manipulation skills.