Master Team Project - Robot Driven Library Maintenance

Many librarian tasks require physical presence in the library and are time-consuming and tedious. The SWT Master Team Project "Robot Driven Library Maintenance" was initiated to automate some of these obligations, in order to make more time for more important, value-adding activities. This report demonstrates in detail the four project phases pursued with the goal develop a fully integrated system for the Mannheim University Library which is able to autonomously support the librarians in inventorying books, searching for books, and checking their status. The system comprises a Turtlebot robot which autonomously goes around the desired book shelves, takes pictures of one shelf-level and transfers them to a server. There, using OpenCV and Tesseract, the stickers on the individual books are recognised and the sticker texts extracted. A report engine matches the recognised books with the target condition of the library and saves its report to a database. The reports are made available through a web frontend both via download and as a HTML5 page. Despite the fact that no fully functional system could be built, an impressive proof of concept under realistic conditions could be achieved, and can be further improved to a full-scale system.