A little robotdesigned by the student of the Master in Industrial Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Antonio Pérez, will make the use of libraries easier, preventing the librarian from having to leave his post to locate any book. An invention that will work in the Antigones library.
The project is part of the Master’s Final Project of this young student, for which was designed based on a robot that already existed on the market and to which some sensors have been incorporated to improve its usefulness in the library.
Antonio Pérez’s initial idea was to make a robot to locate products in a cafeteriabut the complexity of this task made him opt for a device to locate books in a library. ‘At first we wanted to do it for the cafeteria, but it is an environment with many obstacles, the system had to be debugged a lot and to avoid problems we preferred to use it for the library,’ says its creator.
The total cost of the robot project has been 4,000 euros
The work has been directed by Óscar Martínez and Francisco Ortiz, and the designed robot is of low commercial costsince it has a cost of about 800 euro. This way, the structure of the robot has been modified to add an extra sensor that provides a wider and more precise field of vision than the one it brought by default and thus can avoid both fixed and moving objects. The global price has been about 4,000 euros borne by the university itselfwhich will be used by the robot.
For his part, one of the co-directors of the TFM, Óscar Martínez, explained that the young man was very interested in doing a service mobile robotics project, after thinking of an application close to society they realized that until now nothing similar existed in libraries. Currently, if someone asked for a book and could not find it, the librarian had to leave his post at reception to go to the shelf where the book was. Now, it is the librarian himself who gives the instructions to the robot so that it goes to the shelf where the volume is located..
Although Antonio ends his master’s degree with this project and now thinks of taking the opportunity to do an Erasmus +, his work director states that Ideally, another student would continue Antonio’s line of research to improve this robot. or put it to new uses.
