Who made this robot page turner?

[megalomania]

I found a video this weekend demonstrating a page turning robot. The robot is made from LEGO NXT parts I believe. The video links can be found on YouTube and Metacafe at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiE6l_cz9pw and http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1797205/page_turning_robot/

The videos seem to have been posted as early as June of this year, and by the sound of the voice on the vid, by a 12yo boy. I can’t find out anything more about where this video may have come from. There is a second video that I can’t seem to find the link to at the moment. It is pretty much the same thing from a different angle and darker.

Most important, to me, is finding out how this thing can be built. If anyone has any leads as to where this video came from, who made it, if there is a website, etc. I would greatly appreciate it. As far as I can tell the people who upload the videos may not be the original creator.

If the other videos on the YouTube page are all made by the same kid, then he needs to get a woman or something… The “headless man” video mentions the name Jessie, which may be what the YouTube uploaders name “JHWBLENDER” stands for. The video intros all flash D3Digital at the beginning. So far I found a few sites called D3Digital, but nothing that looks like it may be the source.

[Hemisync]

Is this the link you are looking for

http://community.middlebury.edu/~hroth/finalprojectmenubar.html

[megalomania]

Nope, I bookmarked that site a year ago, it is completly different. It is a page turning robot, just not the one in the videos. I am not so hypocritical that I didn't do a google search for "page turning robot" and follow all the links before asking for more help :) I exhausted the obvious, so I either am not looking in the right place, or I missed something.

The kid who made these things has to be following along from some book or instructions. He may build a lot of these, but he is still just a little kid, meaning I don't think he is smart enough to have this many original designs. This sentiment was rather confirmed when I read something yesterday about a lego design contest to build page turners that ended last year. There are a few other lego designs, some engineering projects, but none of them are any good.

There is a ton of this lego NXT crap, too much to easily wade through without knowing more about it. The stupid lego site did not work for me either, it just redirects to their front page with all the kids toys. I stopped playing with my legos 20 years ago...

The lego mindstorm components are obscenly expensive, but they are (according to users observations and lego propaganda) easy to program. The modularity, ease of programming, and well established user community makes these things good choices for some sort of prototyping for someone like me who has no engineering background.

I would much prefer to gather as many of these page turners as I can to see what they are doing that works. Making something like this for myself is a project I would do well into the future. Far better then for me to keep tabs on this stuff now in case someone comes up with something that works.

[sbovisjb1]

Look at:

http://www.accesswave.ca/~kmckenzie/pageturn.html

More interestingly I found a product called the TurnMate and its cheap! Too bad the business went under

http://web.archive.org/web/20060829202257/http://www.turnmate.com/

Good news, the official site is down, but its still being sold!

https://sslrelay.com/musicalgift.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=33&products_id=296

And to Us Dollars, its $66.69! This may be exactly what you were looking for!

http://www.musicalgift.com/catalog/index.php

Edit: Plus shipping it should cost you $80 - $100

[Hulk]

I've seen this lego device somewhere in the news for a research competition for kids. It's a couple of years ago. The competition should have been in Germany.

[Cobalt.45]

A while ago there was a guy who made a working visco fuse machine from Lego's. I thought that was pretty impressive.

Here's one guy's take on building a scanner/page turner, complete w/diagrams and parts lists, etc.: http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html

[megalomania]

The inexpensive variety of page turners are designed for lose bound or spiral bound pages, more specifically for music books. I obviously spend too much time thinking about all this because I know the page turning characteristics of bound hardback books are very different from magazines and softcover books. Optimally, a book should be photographed with the cover at a slightly greater than 90 degree angle, not flat. Most of these inexpensive page turners all work with a flat book. It is easier to turn the pages like this, but it takes away from a considerable advantage of using a digital camera.

Since I overwhelmingly want to digitize hard bound works, this is what I look for in a good page turner. The consensus I have read is that an automatic page turner is a very challenging engineering problem. Personally, I think there have been few attempts because the market was never there until recently. Lack of suitably high resolution digital photography equipment at an economical price has been the greatest barrier, and that barrier has eroded rapidly in the last several years.

I have been in contact with Takayuki Muranushi (the maker of the website Cobalt.45 listed, http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html) on several occasions over the past 2 years about his book scanner. I was the one that suggested to him to use a digital camera, a suggestion he used to build his latest digital camera based page turner.

Takayuki is a grad student wrapping up his masters, so he has not had the time to embellish his new design, nor to put the build instructions like he did with the scanner version. He is possibly my best hope of getting a quality page turner a working reality.

There seems to be this huge price disparity between the commercial page turners and the DIY versions. Takayuki’s book scanner came out at around the same time as the Atiz automatic book scanner. The lego kit costs $200, and the Atiz BookDrive costs $30,000. Other automatic page turners like the two models sold by Kirtas are $75,000 and $180,000. There are others, just as obscenely expensive, but the BookDrive is the least expensive.

Google is tight lipped as to the specifics of their process, but I have pieced together enough information to know they do things similar to what I do. They manually turn the pages using a digital camera stand. For them the devil in the details is the software Google uses to get high throughput and minimize human labor.

I have examined the workings of the expensive commercial systems, I have reviewed many of the patents filed for these systems, and I have kept an eye on the DIY versions in the hopes of gleaning some insight into how to best turn book pages with minimum failure. Perhaps the greatest flaw of the DIY systems to date has been an unacceptably high rate of skipped pages, usually due to more than one page being turned at once. The electrostatic attraction between pages, static cling, causes pages to be skipped. The commercial systems work much better, as one would expect for something costing more than an exotic sports car, but the cost disparity cannot be justified by correcting for static cling alone.

There is a new book scanner from Treventus Mechatronics called the ScanRobot. This thing looks like it sucks up two pages at a time and scans the right and left pages while pulling from the bottom up. I don’t know if it is scanner or camera based, or how much the thing costs. They say it is patented, although I have not come across these patents. The patents are probably German or world, which may be why I have not seen them yet (I have not yet searched for international patents). It is likely obscenely expensive.

The ScanRobot looks like it uses vacuuming to grab the pages. One of the other hideously expensive bookscanners uses something similar to turn the pages. According to the Treventus website, the ScanRobot was first introduced in March 2008 at CeBit, and has been working since last October at a library digitization project at the Bavarian State Library. It seems it may have been under development since 2004. It is only recently that the company has begun marketing the thing. The company propaganda says the ScanRobot is a cost-effective book digitizer, but every company says that about their products.

I calculate it would take about 6-7 years before the $75,000 price tag of a Kirtas book digitizer would pay off vs. paying workers to manually turn pages. I don’t think that expense could be justified considering routine maintenance and service would cost thousands per year on that machine, plus you still have to hire workers to load and unload the books. In 2-3 years that same machine will probably sell for half of what it costs now.

I read a rather ominous quote last week about Google trying to “lock up the digitization of public domain works.” I did not see the original context of this quote, so I don’t know if the person saying this meant Google is trying to claim ownership of all public domain works, or they are trying to get all public domain works digitized and released onto the Internet.

For those of you thinking you can’t “own” public domain works, you most certainly can. You can own it by having the only accessible copy, and then charging people whatever you want to look at that copy. You don’t own the work, just access to that work. This is dangerous because if Google scans everything, why would anyone else bother? They could “lock up” the public domain by being the first to have gone through the trouble and expense, so now no other organization would fund or support a digitization project that duplicates something already available (on Google’s terms). Worse yet, once libraries starting tossing books that have been digitized to make room for newer titles, we will not be able to obtain these books. This forces us to submit to Google’s will, and we will pay dearly for this.

The publisher Wiley is already trying to do this with scientific journals, but publishers are inherently greedy cocksuckers only out for a quick buck. Google may be trying to prevent the situation of public domain knowledge being lost by “locking up” the gap between online modern works and the exclusively offline print works of the bulk of human knowledge. Google already offers all its public domain books free for downloading, and while I hate the prick teasing one-two-skip-a-few displaying of copyrighted books, this is still better than nothing. This does piss off publishers, and what publishers hate must be good.

Ultimately the only way we the people can control this is by digitizing books ourselves. Project Gutenberg has been around long before Google, or Microsoft, even existed. Only with the power in the hands of the people to digitize everything, no strings attached, copyrighted or not, can we be free of the greed and ulterior motives of corporations and governments. I think digital cameras are a great way to do it, and I think automatic page turners remove the greatest barrier keeping ordinary people from digitizing books.

EDIT: I found the price of the ScanRobot, it is 85,000 euros, or $107,117 at today's exchange rate. There is a nice report by Julian Ball just released a few days ago about the Munich Digitisation Centre Scan-Robot-Days held this past June. He gives a good run down of all the major offerings of automatic book scanners. http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/files/2008/10/automated-book-scanners-munich-2008-final.pdf

[sbovisjb1]

Mega, would the robotic music page turner robot have helped at all that I posted in a thread? I am considering the purchase of one.

[megalomania]

No, those types of turners need a flat book with very loose pages, like a magazine or spiral notebook, to be effective. I need something that can handle harder to turn bound pages with the book half closed.

A hard bound book causes the pages to want to flip on their own. A new paperback book is almost impossible to keep open without force. A magazine has minimal binding allowing it to stay open on its own, and a spiral notebook has no binding at all to get in the way.

[Alexires]

Have you had a look at this website Mega? It was posted on here a while ago, but I only found it whilst looking through old posts...

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html

[iHME]

Have you had a look at this website Mega? It was posted on here a while ago, but I only found it whilst looking through old posts...

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html

IIRC that has been posted before here, how else could I have read about it on the forum? A awesome thing nonetheless.

[Cobalt.45]

IIRC that has been posted before here, how else could I have read about it on the forum?It was posted here about six posts ago- by Mega himself....

[Alexires]

Ooooh. How awkward. *tugs collar*. I suppose he has seen it then. :o

Ahh well, I didn't check the poster as I was hunting for NBK's posts and was flat out doing that. There you go.

[jhwblender]

Hello, I saw this when I looked up my name, I am jhwblender and I didn't use instructions I just get Ideas and make them, I didn't use instructions I am around 13, oh and my busness D3-Digital, I am in the prossess of making a website, I still need to get the company started off. :-)

****************

An exception was made for your grammar because of your video. Your videos are potentially very useful, but you will still need to clean up your writing style in future posts.

-Hinckleyforpresident

[megalomania]

Wow, I stand corrected. I guess I should have stuck to my initial prodigy instinct, but how often do you see that on the Internet? You certainly are energetic to design all those from scratch and develop your own business. That goes for anyone of any age.

Did you have document digitization in mind when you made that?