Meet BookBot: the robot that returns your books

Only in Silicon Valley does a robot return your library books.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Residents in Silicon Valley city Mountain View have gotten their first peek at the future with the debut of BookBot, the library’s newest non-human helper. A creation of Google’s Area 120 — an experimental division of the technology juggernaut — the bot is the company’s first personal delivery robot to hit the streets and begin interacting with the public, said Christian Bersch, the project’s team lead.

The pilot will run for nine months with a human handler following behind the BookBot for the first six months, he said. That’s just to make sure it’s operating as planned, get it out of trouble as needed and observe how people are responding. After that, a human will sit behind the controls remotely.

To read more about this innovative new pilot program, and to watch the BookBot in action, head to www.siliconvalley.com