[ros-users] Interest and proposal intention survey for a ROS Handbook

[Anis Koubaa (COINS)]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your feedback and also thanks to those who expressed their interest in this project and the proposal intention. 

I totally agree with you on the points you mentioned below and this is why I think we need to have a comprehensive reference for ROS.
I have been using and developing with ROS for quite some time and although several topics in ROS have good tutorials to start with, several other concepts, in particular new concepts such as rosjava, web tools, Android app, UAV control, arm manipulation, to name a few, are not well documented and it is pretty hard for someone, even with a good background on ROS concepts to work on these things. 

I think the points you mentioned below can be addressed in a series of chapters and provide a systematic approach to ROS enable a robot from scratch. 

Thank you and look forward to receiving your proposals and feedbacks
Anis 

________________________________
 From: Mike Purvis <mpurvis at clearpathrobotics.com>
To: User discussions <ros-users at lists.ros.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2014 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: [ros-users] Interest and proposal intention survey for a ROS	Handbook
 


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


On 22 October 2014 05:31, Anis Koubaa (COINS) <akoubaa at coins-lab.org> wrote:


>
>
>Hello ROS users community,
>
>
>I am coordinating with Springer publisher to edit a handbook on Robot Operating System. 
>There are only a few books on ROS http://wiki.ros.org/Books which mainly represent a brief introduction to ROS and a few basic applications. This does not translate the huge amount of work being done in the community and I feel the need to have a complete reference on the topic. 
>
>
>The prospective handbook will cover ROS from foundations and basics to advanced research works from both academia and industry. Tutorials and research papers will both be sought. The book should cover several robotics areas 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, etc. Every book chapter should be accompanied with a working code to be put later in a common repository for the readers.
>
>
>To express your interest to the handbook and your intention of a chapter proposal, I would like to invite you fill in the following form. The proposed chapters are just  considered as an initial expression of interest and will be included in the handbook proposal. It does not mean any kind of commitment for the author at this stage. An official call for chapters with instructions and deadline will be announced soon. 
>
>
>Thank you and look forward to receive your feedback
>Anis
>
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>Anis Koubaa
>Associate Professor, Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia
>Research Associate, CISTER Research Unit, Portugal 
>http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~akoubaa/
>http://www.iroboapp.org
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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>
>
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>ros-users mailing list
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