Call for Chapters
Springer Book
Robot Operating System (ROS)
The Complete Reference
Objectives
The objective of the book is to provide the reader with a comprehensive coverage on the Robot Operating Systems (ROS), which is currently considered as the main development framework for robotics applications.
ROS (Robot Operating System) has been developed by Willow Garage and Stanford University as a part of STAIR project as a free and open-source robotic middleware for the large-scale development of complex robotic systems. ROS acts as a meta-operating system for robots as it provides hardware abstraction, low-level device control, inter-processes message-passing and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and running code across multiple computers. The main advantage of ROS is that it allows manipulating sensor data of the robot as a labeled abstract data stream, called topic, without having to deal with hardware drivers.
Although the research community is quite active in developing applications with ROS and extending its features, the amount of references does not translate the huge amount of work being done. There are only four books posted in the ROS Wiki website (
http://wiki.ros.org/Books) and all of them are introductory level and do not present a comprehensive coverage on research being done with ROS. In addition, the tutorials provided in ROS Wiki are for basic and fundamental concepts of ROS whereas advanced and new concepts, such as rosjava, using Android for mobile apps development for robot interaction, UAV control, arm manipulation, etc. are not sufficiently documented. Moreover, there is no reference that provides systematic approaches on how to build applications using ROS and how to enable ROS on new robots.
A survey has been posted on ROS users mailing list to express their interest in having a handbook reference on ROS and their intention to propose chapters. There has been a lot of interactions in ROS users mailing list giving their feedback. With unanimity, 100% of respondent confirmed the lack of references on ROS and expressed their interest to contribute to handbook on ROS. Several chapters proposal were received and are presented at the end of this document.
This book intends to fill the gap and to provide ROS users (academia and industry) with a comprehensive coverage on Robot Operating System concepts and applications. It will cover several topics ranging from basics and foundation to advanced research papers. Tutorial, survey and original research papers will be sought. The book will cover several areas related to robot development using ROS including but not limited to robot navigation, UAVs, arm manipulation, multi-robot communication protocols, Web and mobile interfaces using ROS, integration of new robotic platform to ROS, computer vision applications, development of service robots using ROS, development of new libraries and packages for ROS, using ROS in education, etc. Every book chapter should be accompanied with a working code to be put later in a common repository for the readers.
Editor
Affiliation: Prince Sultan University (Saudi Arabia)/CISTER-ISEP Research Center (Portugal)
Publisher
This book is expected to be published in August 2015, by Springer as an edition of the book series “Studies in Systems, Decision and Control”.
For additional information and guidelines regarding the publisher, please visit www.springer.com <
http://www.springer.com/>
Call for Chapters Due Dates
- Abstract Submission: January 05, 2015 (paper registration)
- Full Chapters Due: March 01, 2015
- Chapter Acceptance Notification: May 01, 2015
- Revised Version Due Date: May 21 2014
- Final Notification: 10 June 2015.
- Estimated Publication Date: August 2015.
Topics of Interest
Any contribution that provides an added value to Robot Operating System (ROS) is of interest for the book. The topics of interest include – but not limited to- the following:
- ROS Basics and Foundations
- Robot Control and Navigation
- Arm Manipulation
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Control and Navigation
- ROS-Enabling Robots
- Robot Perception
- ROS Integration to Web and Mobile apps
- Real-World Application Deployment using ROS
- Using ROS in Higher Education
- Robotics Software Engineering with ROS
- Contributed ROS Packages
Chapter Categories
The book will accept three categories of chapters:
- Tutorial chapter: it focuses on a particular ROS concept or a contributed package, and provides a step-by-step tutorial that explains the basics of the concepts/packages. It must also present detailed guidelines on how to use the contributed code. It must specify the ROS versions that are compatible with the tutorial code, and must provide illustrations with figures and code interpretations. The code must be available to public in a shared repository (to be announced later). Accompanying Video tutorials are highly recommended.
- Research chapter: it presents a technical research contribution in the robotics area where ROS was used to validate the findings. The chapter must present sufficient material on the technical contribution in addition to the necessary theoretical background, but a major focus should be made to ROS implementation and experimentation. The implementation and experimentation must be sufficiently detailed for a reader to be able to reproduce the experiments. It must specify the ROS versions that are compatible with the tutorial code, and must provide illustrations with figures and code interpretations. The code must be available to public in a shared repository (to be announced later). Accompanying Video tutorials are highly recommended.
- Case study chapter: a case study chapter should present a real-world experimentation with ROS on particular robotics platform. It should present a detailed description of observations made during experiments, and what are the challenges encountered during development, deployment and experimentation. The chapter should also highlight the best practices that would facilitate deployment and the lessons learnt.
Notes.
- A book chapter template for each category will be provided as a guideline for the authors.
- If your code cannot be shared, please contact the editor.
Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit a 1-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. This helps as a chapter registration for the final submission. Chapter registrations are intended to help detecting and avoiding duplicate or similar chapters in advance.
Submission of abstracts must be done through EasyChair system
Authors of accepted proposals will be notified about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters must be submitted by March 01, 2015 through EasyChair
The Chapter should not exceed 25 pages with respect to Springer format.
All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a single-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.