Bot4Lib

Identified challenge

The primary goal of the project is to automate the inventory process in the reading room of the National Library by implementing an innovative solution that integrates an autonomous robot with an intelligent document recognition system. This robot will navigate public areas to identify individual documents using computer vision. The identification is done using visual information, data stored in Data Matrix codes and / or RFID tags affixed to the documents. The robot will send the collected data to a management system that, in a final step, allows BnL staff to rectify any shelving errors.

This recognition task is complicated by the wide variety of documents, which come in different formats, can be very thin, and sometimes lack distinctive markings (such as text or images) on their spines.