ABB Robots and the Rise of the Library Robot

From card catalogues to NC State's bookBot and Mesa's Romi, library robots are moving to the front desk. How ABB item picking and mobile YuMi ideas could help.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/26/20261 min read

For most of the last century, finding a library book meant a trip to the card catalogue, a drawer of index cards and a walk into the stacks. Staff shelved every returned book by hand and answered the same directions questions over and over.

Black and white photo of students using long rows of card catalogue drawers
Black and white photo of students using long rows of card catalogue drawers

Students at the card catalogue in the University of Texas at Arlington Library. Photo: UT Arlington Photograph Collection / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Machines arrived behind the scenes first. When NC State's Hunt Library opened in 2013, its bookBot stored up to two million volumes in steel bins and fetched any one in about five minutes. At Helsinki's Oodi library, small mobile robots carry returned books from the sorting room up to the shelves.

Tall steel racks of book bins seen through glass in an automated storage system
Tall steel racks of book bins seen through glass in an automated storage system

The bookBot automated storage system at NC State's Hunt Library, 2013. Photo: Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Now robots are moving to the front desk. Mesa's Gateway Library in Arizona, named 2026 Public Library of the Year by IFLA, has Romi, a Bibliotheca robot that guides visitors around the building. On 11 September Stony Brook University Libraries announced $298,000 to build Rubo, an embodied AI robot for library and campus help. The libraries logged about 13,000 in-person requests for directions in a single year.

Small black mobile robot carrying a crate next to wooden benches in a library
Small black mobile robot carrying a crate next to wooden benches in a library

A book-carrying robot at Oodi, Helsinki Central Library, 2020. Photo: ThePikachin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make library robots, but the jobs behind the desk look a lot like warehouse work. ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to pick mixed items it has never seen before, which is roughly what a returns bin full of books, DVDs and games looks like.

ABB robot arm with a suction gripper reaching into a picking station
ABB robot arm with a suction gripper reaching into a picking station

The ABB Robotic Item Picker, which uses AI vision to pick mixed items. Photo: ABB

ABB's PickMaster software guides fast picking robots with cameras, and ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a two-armed robot on a mobile base, was built to move between lab stations in a hospital. A library version could carry and sort books between floors overnight.

Man using a touchscreen on a glass-walled ABB FlexPicker robot cell
Man using a touchscreen on a glass-walled ABB FlexPicker robot cell

An engineer at an ABB FlexPicker cell run with PickMaster software. Photo: ABB

Librarians aren't going anywhere. Rubo and Romi take the "where is the history section" questions, and bookBots do the fetching, which leaves staff more time for the harder questions and the story hour. What I'd really like is a robot that reshelves books in exactly the right place, because a misshelved book is as good as lost.

Two-armed ABB YuMi robot on a mobile base loading a lab centrifuge while a scientist works nearby
Two-armed ABB YuMi robot on a mobile base loading a lab centrifuge while a scientist works nearby

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge in a lab. Photo: ABB

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