The cranes are controlled by software provided by logistics automation company Dematic - called the EMS Control Centre - which has been specially tweaked to communicate with a web service built by UTS to display book covers and notify students of request status.
The Dematic software also communicates with the university’s Millenium integrated library system, provided by software vendor Innovative.
The robot crane receives the information, collects the requested books from the archive, and transports them five stories to the receiving area for the librarian to collect. The system uses the existing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology the university deployed in the library collection in 2012 to load and identify the books. Books are delivered to the receiving area within 15 minutes.