General Resources for the course

This page contains a partial list of handy reference material for the course, including books, software, and tutorials.

Reference books

The following is a list of recommended references for the course. Many of these are freely available online.

[Choset]: H. Choset, K. M. Lynch, S. Hutchinson, G. Kantor, W. Burgard, L. E. Kavraki and S. Thrun, Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations,
MIT Press, Boston, 2005.
[Latombe]: Jean-Claude Latombe, Robot Motion Planning, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.)
[LaValle]: Steven M. LaValle, Planning Algorithms, Cambridge University Press. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.)
[MLS]: R. Murray, z. Li, and S. Sastry, A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation, CRC Press. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.)
[SHV]: M. Spong, S. Hutchinson, M. Vidyasagar, Robot Modelling and Control, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005.

ROS Resources

Most all of the resources below are available for free on the web.

Books

[AGITR] J. O'Kane, A Gentle Introduction to ROS. This book is based on ROS Indigo and uses C++ for its source code examples.
[MF] A. Martinez and E. Fernandez, Learning ROS for Robotics Programming. Packt Publishing, 2013. This book is available online for UIUC folks (the link above takes you to the UIUC library page for the book). This book is based on the Fuerte distribution of ROS, and includes source code examples in C++.
[QGS] M. Quigley, M. Gerkey; W. Smart, Programming Robots with ROS. This book is available online for UIUC folks (the link above takes you to the UIUC library page for the book). Source code examples in this book are written in Python. This book also describes the ROS ecosystem which includes the ROS wiki and the Question and Answer forum.

Resources on the Web

Hyongju's ROS tutorial
ROS Wiki Installation Guide
ROS Wiki tutorials

Other Useful Resources

Checklist for creating ROS packages. This MS Word document lists the steps required for creating a simple ROS package. Feel free to copy this, and to customize it for your own use.
A quick reference list of ROS commands. This MS Word document contains a brief listing of useful ROS commands and terminology. Feel free to copy this, and to customize it for your own use.