IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013 - 150

disability and who is willing to be a pioneer in using a robot
in the workplace. The employee must also have the professional skills necessary to fulfill the job role at the workplace.
The State and University Library of Bremen agreed to be
the employer. After finding the employer, the position was
announced on several appropriate Internet sites for disabled
people. Also, experts in the department of employment who
are familiar with the abilities, disabilities, and wishes of many
disabled individuals were consulted. Through the department of employment, a quadriplegic female end user was
identified who agreed to move to Bremen and to start her
integration into professional life with the help of the FRIEND
system as part of the Bremen Integration Agency project
ReIntegraRob [4].
The FRIEND system usage scenario, i.e., the end user job
description, was developed in cooperation with the University Library of Bremen and consists of the retrospective cataloging of collections of old books. These books are currently
not included in the online catalog, and therefore it is not possible to locate and find
details of them using an
The robot control based on Internet search, a problem that nearly all large
libraries face. To make
speech recognition as the
the information about
control input has proven to such books accessible to
online users, it is necessar y to catalog and
be very exhausting for the
include them in the
online catalog retrospecuser, whereas the BCI has
tively. This means that the
conventional book index
been very slow.
cards have to be transferred into the machinereadable format of the
online catalogs. For this, the librarian has to open each book,
find the bibliographical information, and enter it into the
library's online catalog.
In the FRIEND usage scenario, the FRIEND end user is
the librarian. The books to be cataloged are taken from the
archive by a library worker, and they are brought to the
librarian on a book cart. All of the subsequent manipulative
tasks during the cataloging are carried out by the FRIEND
system: it takes the next book to be cataloged from the top
shelf of the book cart and puts it onto a specially designed
book holder placed in front of the FRIEND end user. The
cataloging is done by the FRIEND end user, who enters the
cataloging information into the library software, PICA,
using speech recognition. After cataloging is completed, the
book is closed, grasped again by the manipulator, and put
back onto the lower shelf of the book cart. Hence, the autonomous book manipulation consists of grasping books from
the book cart, transferring them to the book holder, and
grasping them again to transfer them back to the shelf of the
book cart. The autonomous book grasping is based on
vision-based control of FRIEND's manipulator. The devel150

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2013

opment of robust robot visual perceptual capabilities has
been an important aspect of the improvement of FRIEND's
capability for reliable autonomous functioning over its different generations.
Although the goal has been to develop general methods for vision-based reconstruction of objects to be
manipulated, in different robot working scenarios, different object-specific image processing methods had to
be developed, and different vision-based control structures had to be adopted [19]. The vision-based control of
book manipulation is a key factor for autonomous functioning of FRIEND IV in the library workplace scenario.
The experimental results presented in this article demonstrate that the interaction between the user and the
robot's autonomous procedures enabled a success rate
that was acceptable for the work environment.
Related Work
To the best of our knowledge, the first robotic system supporting a disabled person to work with books was the robot
RAID, which was developed at the Swedish Rehabilitation
Engineering Research Center and was designed to assist in
picking out books from a bookshelf, carrying documents,
and serving drinks in an office environment [13]. RAID did
not have sensors to provide autonomous robot functioning,
and manipulation of the robot gripper to grasp the books
was controlled directly by the user, imposing a significant
mental load on the user. The robot ProVAR [14], which
incorporated force sensors and different interface modes,
allowed people with high cervical spinal cord injuries to
function more independently in a workplace setting by
helping them perform office tasks such as delivering documents, diskettes, video tapes, and so on.
The technically more advanced robotic system CAMP,
proposed in [15], was designed to work in an offsite shelving
facility. The books in the facility were equipped with bar
codes for identification, and the location of each book was
saved in the system database. The end user requested a specific book through an Internet interface in response to which
the mobile system navigated to the target location. Using a
bar code reader mounted on the robot gripper, the book was
identified, grasped by a specially designed parallel gripper,
and delivered to the user. A major drawback of this system
was the empty area needed around each book (40 cm on
both sides). A similar system was presented in [16], where
books are identified by special labels using an optical character recognition (OCR) system. The grasping operation is
achieved by integrating visual and force sensing, where the
vision system is responsible for detecting the book and identifying its approximate location and the force torque sensor
on an industrial parallel plate gripper is responsible for
detecting the exact position of the book borders.
Another mobile system was presented in [17]; it is a
system that does not use any preknowledge of the books
and in which distant users can browse books in a library
through an Internet interface. The user defines the



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