Recent progress in the UJI librarian robot

After several years working in different aspects of service robotics with the aim to improve different capabilities, we are currently devoted to a real life specific problem. This consists on the construction of a complete robotic system designed to assist users in a library, namely the UJI (i.e. the acronym of our University) librarian robot. During the last year new hardware and software has been necessary to improve the different skills required for this task. Thus, we present new results achieved with this system, in particular those related to guide the extraction of a book on a shelf, now by using a hybrid control law, integrating force and visual servoing. At the same time, new results have been obtained improving the automatic book recognition process. All these improvements are aimed at the achievement of the ultimate objective of this very interdisciplinary problem which is the autonomous extraction of a book from the user specification requirement.