It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a chapter of the book "Making Robots Work", to be published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
The book will be included in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Series

Please see below the tentative chapter list, you are free to propose a new chapter but we will give priorities to the one outlined below. The contribution shall be produced in latex
Accepted contributors will receive a free copy of the book.


The book helps the reader to explore, understand, and develop a complex robotic system. I would like to have each chapter written by renowned experts in the field. Each chapter should focus on a particular topic in robotics, providing theoretical grounding and practical programming examples. In Bullet 8, we provide a preliminary list of chapters.

The peculiarity of this book lies in its concise and practical content. Unlike other similar books that gather different, often disconnected fields, we aim at having a red thread throughout the book, with programming examples that build on top of the previous ones to a working mobile manipulator robot. In the book, we point to the most used robot simulator so that the reader needs just a regular laptop to reproduce the examples and do their experiments.

The book provides Python and C++ examples (according to the most used programming language in that particular field in robotics), the most popular programming language and relatively easy to grasp for newbies and use off-the-shelf tools freely available online. The middleware we aim to use is ROS2, an evolution of ROS, the most used robotic middleware boasts over 3,300 users on the collaborative documentation wiki and around 5,700 users on the community-driven ROS Answers Q&A website.

The book aims at students and professionals interested in having a practical grounding in robotics. By the end of the book, the reader will have the theoretical understanding and practical skills to design and program a robotic system

Tentative Chapter List:

Chapter 0 – Introduction
This chapter will cover few broad fundamental principles, the evolution of robotics in history, and its current challenges.

Chapter 1 - Robot Programming
This chapter introduces robot programming with python3 and C++. It presents a simple programming example and introduces the Robot Operating System (ROS2) with the gazebo simulator. We will also show how to set up a simulation environment to run our examples in the following chapters.

Chapter 2 - Making Robots Navigate
This chapter introduces the problems of robot localization and navigation. It first covers the basic mathematical principles behind the state-of-the-art approaches. Then, it provides practical hands-on examples, possibly using ROS Nav2, implemented in the simulation environment developed in the previous chapter.

Chapter 3 - Making Robots Grasp
This chapter introduces the problems of robot manipulation and grasping. It first covers the basic mathematical principles behind the state-of-the-art approaches. Then, it provides practical hands-on examples, possibly using MoveIt!. It then shows how to integrate robot manipulation with the navigation and localization solutions developed in the previous chapter.

Chapter 4 - Making Robots See
This chapter introduces the problems of object detection and tracking. It first covers the basic mathematical principles behind the state-of-the-art approaches. Then, it provides practical hands-on examples. It then shows how to integrate these solutions with the robot capabilities developed in the previous chapters.

Chapter 5 - Making Robots Decide
This chapter introduces the problems of decision-making and task planning. It first covers the basic mathematical principles behind the state-of-the-art. Then, it provides practical hands-on examples. It then shows how to integrate these solutions with the robot capabilities developed in the previous chapters.

Chapter 6 - Making Robots Think
This chapter introduces the problem of robot learning. It first covers the basic mathematical principles behind the state-of-the-art approaches. Then, it provides practical hands-on examples. It then shows how to integrate these solutions with the robot capabilities developed in the previous chapters.

Chapter 7 - Making Robots Work
This chapter includes a final example that shows how to integrate all the solutions presented in the previous chapters.


To contribute, check the website https://miccol.github.io/posts/2021/03/callforchapters/