IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019 - 4

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

Celebrating 25 Years!
By Bram Vanderborght

hope you had a wonderful time at the
2019 IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Automation (ICRA
2019) in Montréal and came back with
a lot of inspiration. During the IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
Town Hall meeting, we celebrated 25
years of IEEE Robotics and Automation
Magazine (RAM). The first issue
appeared in March 1994 and had four
articles. Since then, the magazine has
grown to include not only high-impact
articles (the magazine is at the top in the
journal rankings) but also news, columns,
and other features.
We were pleased to have all of the
past editors-in-chief, save one, present
during the celebration: Prof. Kimon P.
Valavanis, Prof. Stefano Stramigioli, Prof.
Peter Corke, and Prof. Eugenio Guglielmelli (founding editor Prof. Michael
Leahy was unable to attend). We were
also happy to have Rosalyn (Roz) Snyder
in attendance; without her support and
work, there would have been nothing to
celebrate. Three of our advertisers were
also represented: Amy Blank, Barrett
Technologies; Ralph Hollins, Butterfly
Haptics; and Kristin Kemp, ATI Industrial Automation. This success story was
possible only thanks to you: our authors,
reviewers, editors, advertisers, and readers. We hope we can count on you in the
future as we try to further innovate the
magazine (and other RAS periodicals) to
better serve our Society.
At ICRA 2019, we announced the third
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine Best Paper Award, presented for
the article "Walking and Running With
Passive Compliance: Lessons From
Engineering: A Live Demonstration of
the ATRIAS Biped," which appeared in
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2908566
Date of publication: 12 June 2019

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

JUNE 2019

the September 2018 issue and
was authored by Christian
Hubicki, Andy Abate, Patrick Clary, Siavash Rezazadeh, Mikhail Jones, Andrew
Peekema, Johnathan Van
Why, Ryan Domres, Albert Wu,
William Martin, Hartmut Geyer, and
Jonathan Hurst. Congratulations! These
authors delivered ground-breaking
research but also valorized research by
the Agility Robotics company. Recently,
we received the news that the company
presented Digit, which builds on the
design of the ostrich-like Cassie robot.
Maybe you also spotted this article,
together with several other RAM and
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
articles, during ICRA 2019.
As announced in my December
2018 editorial, our aim is to tighten
cooperation among the conferences
and journals and progressively discourage the traditional evolutionary model.
This is to comply with IEEE guidelines
on reducing, as much as possible, the
overlap between conference and journal publications archived in IEEE
Xplore. RAM and T-RO articles will also
be presented during the 2019 IEEE/
Robotic Society of Japan International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS 2109). Let me again
briefly mention the most important
rules (which are the same for T-RO and
can be found online): the paper must
not be a mere extension of the conference proceedings, filling in, for example, details of proofs or additional corollaries, additional experiments, or a
more detailed background and narrative. Rather, the journal submission
must contain new results of substantive
research with significance and impact
beyond the conference version. The
authors must make clear in the text of

the article the importance
and research significance of
these additional results,
including any changes and
additions to the original
material presented in the conference version. Sources must be
indicated during the submission procedure and explicitly cited in the manuscript. Moreover, IEEE Robotics and
Automation Letters allows for direct
publication of a conference paper in an
archival journal. Take advantage of this
new possibility, and submit your new
scientific results to RAM-from articles
for the practicing engineer to those
with a focus on working systems.
Contributions to this vision can be
found in this special issue on socially
assistive robotics. The goal of the robots
described in the six special issue articles is
to help people through social interactions
in a noncontact manner during their
daily tasks and for rehabilitation, training,
and education. I would like to thank the
guest editors, Prof. Adriana Tapus
(ENSTA-ParisTech, France), Prof. Ayanna
Howard (Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta), and Isamu Kajitani (National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology, Tokyo, Japan). I also
thank all of the authors for sharing their
research on these human-friendly robots
as well as the authors of the two additional features, "Robots Can Teach Students With Intellectual Disabilities: Educational Benefits of Using Robotic and
Augmented Reality Applications" and
the industry tutorial "Underwater
Robots: From Re mote ly Operated
Vehicles to Intervention-Autonomous
Underwater Vehicles."
Let us meet again in person at
IROS 2019 to further discuss these
RAM articles as well as other papers.
Enjoy the issue!

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019