In the future, you may be able to walk right up to your local library robot and tell it what book you want. It will shuffle off, locate the book, lift it off the shelf, and bring it back to you. That's the dream of robot engineers in Spain who are working on developing robots that retrieve books from shelves using a combination of image recognition, voice recognition and navigation technologies.
It's all part of the dream to make robots more practical. After all, robots are interesting demonstrations of technology, but if they can't be helpful to the rest of us, they'll never succeed commercially. So robotics engineers are hard at work teaching these machines how to do things that save time for humans: Roomba sweeps floors, hospital robots shuttle supplies for health care workers, and industrial robots assemble cars. So why not have a robot that grabs library books for you?
Of course, you wouldn't need a robot at all if all the library books were scanned and loaded into an ebook format. But that would anger book publishers, who don't even seem to like the idea of public libraries these days. (It's all that darned sharing!)
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, and he is well known as the creator of popular downloadable preparedness programs on financial collapse, emergency food storage, wilderness survival and home defense skills. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2010, Adams created TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural living video sharing site featuring thousands of user videos on foods, fitness, green living and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter software company that develops software used to send permission email campaigns to subscribers. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and practices nature photography, Capoeira, martial arts and organic gardening. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org
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Thursday, July 22, 2004
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