Hello,
Paul, you are totally right and I personally have purchased the two volumes of ROS by examples and fully read volume 1 and volume 2 is in progress. I found them excellent references and I am using them in one ongoing project.
Just let me explain that the idea of the handbook is to go beyond basics. In ROS community, there are several contributed packages and several industrial use cases that probably most of users do not know about. They can be scattered in research papers where the focus is on validation but not on ROS package development itself. The prospective handbook intends to give more value and more focus on such contributed packages, in addition to traditional concepts of ROS.
Take the example of UAVs. There are several UAVs that are supported by ROS but very small number have a sufficiently good documentation. One other example is for instance adding a new global or local path planner to ROS. You can find general docs about adding plugin but nothing specific to adding plugin to global and local planners. It happens I did a tutorial on adding a global path planner to ROS nav stack and add it to ROS wiki.
There are so many packages that can see the light through a handbook, because at least it will be worth a publication for the developers.
This is to give a clearer idea on the objective of a handbook and what contributions it can provide to ROS users.
It is not intended to be a competitor of existing books but to provide a complementary reference.
Just to keep you updated, I shall be sending an official call for chapters in a couple of weeks with some guidelines, and any valuable contribution will be welcome.
Thanks for all who send their feedback and proposals.
Anis
All,
I want to give a shout out for the ROS By Example books by Patrick
Goebel. They are listed on the books wiki page Anis pointed to. They
explain many of the areas Mike cites as needing comprehensive
explanation, and also contain a lot of examples that help you follow
along, and are re-released with updates for each new version of ROS.
There's an active google group for asking questions about material
in the book. The two books are a level above the tutorials because
they tie many packages together into solutions. At $15 - $22 for the
e-book, or $25 - $38 for paperback, they are excellent value. If you
work with ROS and aren't one of the illuminati, you really should
have them on your disk or bookshelf.
New books should take these books' contributions into account (IMHO)
and offer value in new areas - there's still a lot of ground that
should be covered.
This is a public-service announcement for those who haven't looked
at the books that are already out there; I have no connection to the
author.
Regards
Paul Bouchier
On 10/22/2014 12:29 PM, Mike Purvis
wrote:
Hi Anis,
I'm not sure how to express this through your form, but
something that's badly needed from Clearpath's perspective is
a modern take on what the parts are which make up a typical
ROS robot. This is beyond the "basics" of building a
workspace, creating publishers and subscribers, launching
things, etc, but it's not as high-level as specific packages
like navigation, moveit, etc.
Obviously there's a lot of variability out there, but if
someone were to build a robot today, from scratch, to use ROS,
they'd ask some fundamental questions like:
- How do I build a URDF for my robot? How do I name the
links and joints? Should I have a base_footprint? Should I
use xacro?
- What's the deal with robot_state_publisher, and what's
the relationship between the joint_states topic and my TF
tree?
- Where do the odom and map frames come from? Should I
always expect them to be there, or do they come and go
depending what's running? How do I handle REP-105 if my
robot has a GPS receiver? What about if it has an
integrated GPS-INS?
- Now that I have a URDF, how do I bring my robot up in
Gazebo? How do I give my simulated robot an IMU, LIDAR,
and camera?
- How does my robot know where it is? What is
localization, and what topics are consumed and produced by
it?
- For a "typical" encoders + imu + LIDAR configuration,
what topics should I expect to see, where, and on what
frequencies?
- How do I set up my robot to use ros_control and the
existing suite of available controllers? Should I have a
real-time control loop? If so, how do I set that up in
Ubuntu?
- How should I set up ROS to launch automatically when I
turn on my robot? How do I manage logs, node output, and
bag files?
There's been discussion in the past about specifying some
standards for this kind of thing, possibly in a REP, but a
great first step would be a book or other resource which
presented this material in an approachable, linear kind of
way.
Mike
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