The UJI librarian robot

This paper describes the UJI Librarian Robot, a mobile manipulator that is 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 is only provided with the book code, a library map and some knowledge about its logical structure and takes advantage of the spatio-temporal constraints and regularities of the environment by applying disparate techniques such as stereo vision, visual tracking, probabilistic matching, motion estimation, multisensor-based grasping, visual servoing and hybrid control, in such a way that it exhibits a robust and dependable performance. The system has been tested, and experimental results show how it is able to robustly locate and grasp a book in a reasonable time without human intervention

The UJI Aerial Librarian Robot: A Quadcopter for Visual Library Inventory and Book Localisation

Over time, the field of robotics has provided solutions to automate routine tasks in different scenarios. In particular, libraries are awakening great interest in automated tasks since they are semi-structured environments where machines coexist with humans and several repetitive operations could be automatically performed. In addition, multirotor aerial vehicles have become very popular in many applications over the past decade, however autonomous flight in confined spaces still presents a number of challenges and the use of small drones has not been reported as an automated inventory device within libraries. This paper presents the UJI aerial librarian robot that leverages computer vision techniques to autonomously self-localize and navigate in a library for automated inventory and book localization. A control strategy to navigate along the library bookcases is presented by using visual markers for self-localization during a visual inspection of bookshelves. An image-based book recognition technique is described that combines computer vision techniques to detect the tags on the book spines, followed by an optical character recognizer (OCR) to convert the book code on the tags into text. These data can be used for library inventory. Misplaced books can be automatically detected, and a particular book can be located within the library. Our quadrotor robot was tested in a real library with promising results. The problems encountered and limitation of the system are discussed, along with its relation to similar applications, such as automated inventory in warehouses.Support for the research conducted at UJI Robotic Intelligence Laboratory is provided in part by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (DPI2015-69041-R), by Universitat Jaume I (UJI-B2018-74), and by Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2020/034, GV/2020/051)

Robot Vision for Manipulation: A Trip to Real-World Applications

Along the last decades, Robotics research has taken a major turn from laboratories to factories and ordinary real-world environments. Consequently, new issues to be overcome have arisen, specially when autonomous, dexterous robots are in place. In this paper, we present this evolution in the case of robot vision for manipulation through several robot developments, by analysing their challenges and proposed solutions. This overview highlights the need of using different techniques depending on the task at hand and the scenario to work in.This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under Grant DPI2015-69041-R, in part by Universitat Jaume I under Grant UJI-B2018-74, and in part by Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEO/2020/034 and GV/2020/051

The Highlights of the IFLA WLIC Preconference Satellite Meeting - Information Technology Section - Robots in Libraries: Challenge or Opportunity

On August 21 & 22, 2019, I attended the IFLA WLIC Pre-conference Satellite Meeting - Robots in Libraries: Challenge or Opportunity at Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Berlin, Germany. Here is my notes for the pre-conference. The full text is written both in English and Chinese

LEGO LIBRARIAN: Book Carrier

Artificial Intelligence is seen as a potential contributor in many industries and also in everyone’s life. Transporting heavy loads is indeed difficult for humans to perform especially for elderly. This project focuses on solving the problem in the library of University Teknologi PETRONAS. An inexpensive, mobile and efficient robot is proposed to perform in this project. The robot is able to carry books and pass it to Book Sorter to place the books on the shelves. In this report, the functionalities of the robot have been discussed in detail. Moreover, the proposed design of the robot has also been attached. A study of load balancing, the speed of the robot surface type are conducted. The design has been tested with three parameters to obtain the optimum design of the robot. The design was further enhanced as it is necessary to meet the objectives of this project

Lego Librarian: Book Sorter

Manual book sorting is time consuming and laborious. Traditionally, human librarians have to get the books from the circulation desk to be sorted and carry the books around to the right locations and putting it on the right shelf. It is prone to misplacement of books in the library. It is quite difficult and seems impractical to return the books back to the original locations daily. To overcome this problem, a book sorting robot known as Book Sorter, a small scaled prototype has been proposed as a simulation of an efficient method to ease the daunting task of librarians in the manual organisation of books. It is also proposed to provide a better allocation of resources of a library. Book Sorter is built as a robot that compliments another robot in LEGO Librarian called Book Carrier. LEGO Librarian is an automated system that is used for organising books on the shelf at the library. The scope of study for this project involves the current system used in the UTP library as well as the robotics application in the librarian system that covers some chapters of study. The activity diagram describes the overall process flow of the system and the development methodology used in this project is throwaway prototyping.. Several interview, survey, field test and acceptance testing were conducted and briefly discussed in Chapter 4. This project is expected to have vast potential to provide a view in real life especially in its capability to alleviate the intensive labours and efforts (time) in sorting the books automatically onto the right shelves

A Practical Approach for Picking Items in an Online Shopping Warehouse

Commercially viable automated picking in unstructured environments by a robot arm remains a difficult challenge. The problem of robot grasp planning has long been around but the existing solutions tend to be limited when it comes to deploy them in open-ended realistic scenarios. Practical picking systems are called for that can handle the different properties of the objects to be manipulated, as well as the problems arising from occlusions and constrained accessibility. This paper presents a practical solution to the problem of robot picking in an online shopping warehouse by means of a novel approach that integrates a carefully selected method with a new strategy, the centroid normal approach (CNA), on a cost-effective dual-arm robotic system with two grippers specifically designed for this purpose: a two-finger gripper and a vacuum gripper. Objects identified in the scene point cloud are matched to the grasping techniques and grippers to maximize success. Extensive experimentation provides clues as to what are the reasons for success and failure. We chose as benchmark the scenario proposed by the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge, since it represents a realistic description of a retail shopping warehouse case; it includes many challenging constraints, such as a wide variety of different product items with a diversity of properties, which are also presented with restricted visibility and accessibility.This paper describes research conducted at the UJI Robotic Intelligence Laboratory. Support for this laboratory is provided in part by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (DPI2015-69041-R, DPI2017-89910-R), by Universitat Jaume I (P1-1B2014-52) and by Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2020/034). The first author was recipient of an Erasmus Mundus scholarship by the European Commission for the EMARO+ Master Program

Survey of Visual and Force/Tactile Control of Robots for Physical Interaction in Spain

Sensors provide robotic systems with the information required to perceive the changes that happen in unstructured environments and modify their actions accordingly. The robotic controllers which process and analyze this sensory information are usually based on three types of sensors (visual, force/torque and tactile) which identify the most widespread robotic control strategies: visual servoing control, force control and tactile control. This paper presents a detailed review on the sensor architectures, algorithmic techniques and applications which have been developed by Spanish researchers in order to implement these mono-sensor and multi-sensor controllers which combine several sensors