Last week, during the annual conference of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C., the Springer Handbook of Robotics was given the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics. It also won in the Engineering & Technology subcategory.
The July 2008 issue of Miller-McCune magazine featured an in-depth interview with one of the handbook’s editors, Bruno Siciliano, a professor of control and robotics at the University of Naples, Italy, and the president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the world’s leading robot research association. Much of last summer’s interview focused on the efforts of Siciliano and his co-editor, Stanford University professor Oussama Khatib, in compiling the 1,611-page handbook, which brought together 165 different authors from around the world to provide a comprehensive roundup of the very latest research in robotics.
“This is a tribute to robotics as an established scientific field and an acknowledgement of the accomplishments of the 50 years of work our research community has achieved,” Siciliano and Khatib said in a statement of gratitude for the prize. “The PROSE Awards recognize, above all, the efforts our editors and authors have devoted to this challenge, with their contributions, commitment and passion.”
Added Thomas Ditzinger, their editor at Springer: “We submitted the Springer Handbook of Robotics to the PROSE Awards because Springer was convinced that it constitutes the most authoritative publication in this modern and growing scientific discipline.”
The handbook was also the Springer bestselling title in engineering in 2008.
