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

Anis Koubaa (COINS) akoubaa at coins-lab.org
Sun Oct 26 19:11:07 UTC 2014


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

From:  Paul Bouchier <bouchier at classicnet.net>
Reply-To:  User discussions <ros-users at lists.ros.org>
Date:  Sunday, October 26, 2014 9:30 PM
To:  <ros-users at lists.ros.org>
Subject:  Re: [ros-users] Interest and proposal intention survey for a ROS
Handbook

    
 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
>  
>  
> 
>  
> 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
>> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JD78gka1rtotjGhBre-UJcm7QogQWUeURjvx4X028vw
>> /viewform> . 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://ww.dei.isep.ipp.pt/%7Eakoubaa/>
>>  
>> http://www.iroboapp.org
>>  
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>  
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  ros-users mailing list
>>  ros-users at lists.ros.org
>>  http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>  
>>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>   
>  
> _______________________________________________
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>  
 
 
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