Most of us don’t find scanning books a particularly arduous task. However, most of us don’t realize just how many pages a book has, and how difficult it is to get an accurate scan of any given page. And that’s why the University of Tokyo made a revolutionary book scanning robot that could scan 250 pages a minute!
This speed is much quicker compared to the 12 pages per minute that the most modern scanners have. What’s more, these 12 pages per minute must be fed manually, whereas this robot makes scanning a breeze. But how exactly is this sort of a robot so special?
Well, this robot is special in a few ways. Most prominently, it abandons the concept of a flat scanner. Instead, it uses an actual camera scanner that calculates the curve of the pages as the pages are flipped, and ultimately accommodates the problem that the curve of the pages creates.
Another way that this robot is special is how it flips the pages of the book. The robot holds the spine of the book with a little tension so that the pages can be flipped with only a fraction of a millimeter of movement from a robotic arm.
Before we all grab for the chance to use this super scanning tool, there are a few things to be noted. First, it has not been tested whether a books spine can handle this sort of pressure for extended periods of time, and this scanner also does not work for newspapers or other textual references that someone might need.
Despite these flaws, this robotic scanner is something to be marveled. It delivers scans with stunning clarity and accuracy, just like someone had ripped out a page of a book. With such perfection, and such technological advancement in the world of robotics, there’s no doubt that such technologies as these will be seen more in the future.
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