IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2010 - 2

F R O M T H E

E D I TO R' S D E S K

First Anniversary as an EiC
A Publication of the
IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION SOCIETY
Volume 17, No. 4 December 2010 ISSN 1070-9932
EDITORIAL BOARD
Editor-in-Chief
Peter Corke
School of Engineering Systems
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
Associate Editors
Davide Brugali Universit
a degli Studi di
Bergamo (Italy)
Raffaella Carloni University of Twente (The
Netherlands)
Eugenio Guglielmelli Universit
a Campus Bio-Medico
di Roma (Italy)
You-Fu Li City University of Hong Kong
Srikanth Saripalli Arizona State University (USA)
Bram Vanderborght Vrije Universitaet Brussel
(Belgium)
Past Editor-in-Chief
Stefano Stramigioli, University of Twente (The Netherlands)
Book Review Editor: Pedro Sanz, Jaume I University (Spain)
Industry Editor: Raj Madhavan, NIST and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (USA)
RAM Video Editor: Jonathan Roberts, CSIRO (Australia)
RAM Web Editor: Bram Vanderborght,
Vrije Universitaet Brussel (Belgium)
Columns
Research/Industry News: Jeanne Dietsch,
Adept Mobile Robots, Inc. (USA)
Competitions: Stephen A. Balakirsky,
NIST (USA)
From the Editor's Desk: Peter Corke
ROS Topics: Steve Cousins,
Willow Garage (USA)
Education: Andreas Birk, Jacobs University (Germany)
Student Corner: Tamas Haidegger,
University of Budapest (Hungary)
IFRR (International Foundation of Robotics Research):
Oussama Khatib, Stanford University
Turning Point: Peter Corke Editor-in-Chief
IEEE RAS Vice-President for Publications
Peter Luh, University of Connecticut (USA)
RAM homepage: http://www.ieee-ras.org/ram
Robotics and Automation Society Administrator
Rosalyn Graham Snyder
(admin@ram.ieee-ras.org)
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his is my fourth editorial, which marks the end of my first year
at the helm of the magazine. It has been a big year, celebrating
50 years of robotics as a technical field, digital delivery of the
magazine starting with the last issue, and working with the IEEE
design staff on a whole new look and feel for the magazine that will
debut in 2011.
I took over the role of editor-in-chief with a
big agenda, the magazine manifesto, and we are
well along the path that it outlined. I hope you
are enjoying the newer and more diverse columns, as well as the change in emphasis from
a transactions-like publication to a magazine.
Reflecting on the first year of this job, I have to
say the most surprising aspect is the almost complete lack of feedback, good or bad, from readers. It would be good
to hear if you have an opinion. I dream of having a letters to the editor section in the magazine but maybe our community isn't ready
for that quite yet.
The magazine's YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/
user/IEEERAM is a quality-controlled archive of videos about real
robots and is moderated by our video editor Jonathan Roberts. I don't
believe we're capturing enough of what the community is doing, so
please contact Jon and get your videos uploaded to the IEEERAM
channel. There are a lot of robot videos on YouTube (some good and
some terrible), so let's make our channel the place to go for quality robot
videos that we are collectively proud of.
In this issue, we have another new column, "Entrepreneur," written by Ralph Hollis on the joys and challenges of starting a small business based on robotic technology. The "Editor's Corner" column,
which first appeared in the last issue, has an article by Seth Hutchinson, editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, with solid advice
about how to respond to reviews once the emotional reaction has
subsided. Reviews are an important part of a paper's development
and absolutely critical to the quality of scholarship in our community.
This complements nicely the article on preparing a talk, which we
had in the last issue. There will be more articles on these kinds of
life skills.
This issue has a special focus on authentication for robots, which
was organized by Marina Gavrilova and Roman Yampolskiy. It
looks at the techniques that will be needed in the future so that
robots can securely identify humans and other robots. It is a somewhat futuristic topic but one that will only grow in importance. We
also have the second part of Roy Featherstone's tutorial on sixdimensional vectors.
I have some ideas about future tutorials, but if you have a suggestion
for a topic or would like to write a tutorial, please contact me. Tutorials
are among our most highly cited articles. Keep in mind that the maga-

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938830

DECEMBER 2010

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2010