Auross: An Autonomous Robotic Shelf Scanning System

Tracking of items on shelves is an important but time-consuming task in inventory control. In particular, books in public libraries are frequently borrowed and returned, even misplaced, and proves a challenge to be tracked on a daily basis. To track the books efficiently, we propose the Autonomous Robotic Shelf Scanning (AuRoSS) system. This paper elaborates on the key enabling robotic technology for the fully autonomous system, namely, a navigation system with surface tracking capability. A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader is carried by the navigation system to identify the RFID tags embedded in each book. Based on the tag information, a tracking report that highlights missing and misplaced books is generated for the end users. To ensure successful identification, the surface tracking requires high accuracy, for which we propose a filtered Hough transform and a macro-mini manipulator structure. Tests of the AuRoSS system in a library show high accuracy in the scanning performance.