Researchers at Universitat Jaume I in Spain are designing a robot librarian of sorts. The three-wheeled bot listens for verbal book requests, heads to the approximate location of the title on a shelf, and uses digital cameras to read the spines. The toughest challenge is engineering a grasper with "fingernails" to pull out the book, Professor Angel del Pobil told the BBC:
"It is mimicking the way we manipulate our hands. We have constant feedback from tactile sensors, so it is moving very slowly. In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard. Now it touches gently."
