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Book-Scanning ScanRobot Neater Than Navicloud Custom Debinder
ScanRobot the book-scanning robot by Treventus Mechantronics, can scan entire books without any help from human beings.
(ScanRobot book-scanning robot video)
As you can see in the above video, ScanRobot gently peruses books that are placed at a sixty degree angle. The prism-shaped scanner delicately nestles between the pages, flashing the page with LED lights for digital capture. It appears to use static electricity to hold the page to the glass.
Then, when it finishes scanning a pair of pages, air jets turn to the next page. ScanRobot can digitize 25 pages per minute. It can be easily adjusted for slim volumes as well as books large enough to stun an ox.
The ScanRobot is much neater than the fictional Navicloud Custom Debinder book scanner, described with book-torturing glee by Vernor Vinge in his excellent 2006 novel Rainbows End:
And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner...The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw - the source of the noise... The raging maw was a "Navicloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel..." The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in a tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stiched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation...
(Read more about Vinge's Navicloud Custom Debinder)
Via Dvice.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/9/2008)
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