robot capable of distinguishing individual pages

http://www.canon.com/technology/canon_tech/explanation/compact_interferometer.html
Overkill?  Maybe.

You could just use OCR to check the page numbers...

Some ideas:

1.  Hold an LED against one side of the page.  Hold a
     sensor against the other side.  Measure how much
     light shines through.  Most paper is somewhat
     translucent, but two pages will block much more
     light than one.

2.  Hold a metal plate against each side of a page.
     Measure the capacitance between the two plates.
     If you picked up two pages, the capacitance should
     be about half of normal.


Look at the mechanism in printers.  They need to be
able to pick up one page at a time from the feed tray.
But they don't work perfectly, and the quality of paper
they deal with is probably better than you will get from
a random book.

    There are many page-turning mechanisms, most of which sort of work.
Nobody has one that works a very high percentage of the time and reliably
self-adjusts to the books being scanned.  The Internet Archive book
scanning people have struggled with this.

    The better mechanisms usually involve a vacuum.  See, for example,

    http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20030172795.html

                    John Nagle

Do you know if anyone has tried using a mild adhesive, like on
a Post-It note?  It seems like that would pick up a page fairly
reliably, and if a second page was detected sticking to the
first, it could be pulled loose with another sticky finger coming
from the other side.

The major downside that I can see is that the adhesive would
wear out after a few thousand pages, so you would need to
have some way to automatically renew the adhesive if
manual intervention is to be avoided.

    Yes.  I found that with Google within fifteen seconds.

    Please do some homework before posting questions.  Thanks.

                    John Nagle

The idea of using an adhesive might work.  I read an article which
described using Polydimethylsiloxane, the main ingredient in silly
putty.  I had previously considered using suction to lift a page, but
there might be the possibility of bleedthrough picking up extra pages
with the suction.  Any suggestions about which of these two methods
would be the best?

--snip--

I probably missed it, since _someone_ must have posted a suggestion
to use spot-vacuum-pressure to lift a page... but I'll second it
anyway. <grin!>

Imagine placing a soda straw on the page and sucking on the other
end. Now imagine using a flexible plastic hose, say 1/8" or 1/16"
with an air pump motor on the other end and valved via a solenoid.
I wouldn't think you'd need all that much suction, unless you were
using 100lb paper.

Want to be sure you only have one page and not two or three? Use a
copy of the same not-appearing-in-this-picture mechanism you used to
guide the first hose against the page to be turned, only touch this
second hose to the _back_ of the just-lifted page. If you can lift
the second "hose" away from the page-or-multiple-pages without
breaking the vacuum on the first hose, you just separated an extra
page from the first. Repeat as necessary.

The details (and variants) are left as an exercise for the reader
(translation: I think I'll step off this limb before I _completely_
cut it off <grin!>).


--
    Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is
    no path and leave a trail.  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

    Vacuum based paper handling systems are common and reliable,
but noisy, which is why they're not seen much in office environments.
Large sheet fed printing presses, check sorters, mark sense readers,
and similar machinery usually have vacuum feeders.

    The robotics part of the problem would be to build something that
looks at the book with a camera or two and figures out where and how
the picking and holding devices should be placed.  That would
be an advance over current technology, which usually takes too
much manual adjustment and watching.

    Here's one made from Lego:

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


                    John Nagle

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:00:33 -0000, dmehling@keenebroadband.com


The usual suggestion is to use a light vacuum device to lift the
page. To get the other pages to let go of the first page, put an
electrostatic charge on the page being picked up.