[agents] Springer Book on Robot Operating System (ROS): Call for Chapters

[Anis Koubaa (COINS)]

Submission of abstracts is tomorrow Jan 05, 2014.

Please disseminate in your contact list.
Call for Chapters

Springer Book
Robot Operating System (ROS)
The Complete Reference

http://events.coins-lab.org/springer/springer_ros_book.html

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
Anis Koubaa <http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~akoubaa/> , Associate Professor,
PhD
Affiliation: Prince Sultan University (Saudi Arabia)/CISTER-ISEP Research
Center (Portugal)
Email: akoubaa at coins-lab.org

Publisher
This book is expected to be published in August 2015, by Springer as an
edition of the book series ³Studies in Systems, Decision and Control².
http://www.springer.com/series/13304
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.
All papers must be written using the following Springer Template
<http://events.coins-lab.org/springer/springer_template.zip> .

Submission of abstracts must be done through EasyChair system
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=springerrosbook2015

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
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=springerrosbook2015

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.