Autonomous Robot for Inventory Management in Libraries

Abstract

This paper proposes an autonomous robot to reduce labor, increase the efficiency of existing inventory management systems and provide a solution to develop an automated inventory. Managing a college library comes under inventory management. Like an inventory management system, the library also faces problems with the availability of books. For example, when a book gets returned, the database gets updated and indicates that the book is available, but one cannot find the book in its location as it has not been placed there. The time and energy of the librarian are wasted as the books have to be placed back to its location. These problems are solved by designing an inventory management robot that is implemented in a library to put the returned books back to its location. The returned books are placed on the shelves of the robot. The robot scans the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag of books to get the shelf location of the books and then navigates through the library to the location where the book should be and places the book on its shelf thus making the book available quickly. The innovation of this system is that since it works in a known environment, it does not run on complex SLAM techniques, thus reducing the complexity of the system while being relatively flexible. This implementation also does not require any significant changes to be made to its environment.