Design and control of the librarian robot system in the ubiquitous robot technology space

To make structured environment aims at establishing the information structured environment which enables robots to get information and knowledge necessary to carry out the given tasks from the environment. In this paper, we build the information structured environment named the u-RT space, and then design and control the librarian robot system based on the proposed environment, which can put books on the proper slot in the bookshelf using the ambient intelligence and the book information. First, we introduce the information structured space where the physical space and the virtual space are connected each other, and propose the robot localization method and the bookshelf information system based on the ambient intelligence realized by the RFID technology. Next, we introduce the librarian robot system which consists of the manipulator which can recognize and manipulate books, and the mobile platform which can localize itself and navigate using the ambient RFID tags implanted under the floor even if there are high bookshelves. Then we propose the classification and integration method of the information from various ambient sensors which enables the proposed robot to complete given missions successfully. Finally, the performance of the proposed librarian robot system is evaluated by the experiment based on an example scenario in the u-RT space.