IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2011 - 4

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK *

Changes for Betterment
By Peter Corke

I

t is surprising that we are already in
our second year of electronic delivery.
Our first trial issue was in September
2010, and it became a subscription
option at the beginning of this year.
The magazine has a readership of 7,943
members and affiliates (until 30 June),

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2011.942478
Date of publication: 13 September 2011

4

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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and of those about 30% have
opted to take the magazine
in only electronic form.
From the personal comments at the IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation and
the e-mails I received, it seems that
most people enjoy this form of delivery. Personally, I'm keeping a growing
collection of magazines in my iPad,
and I find it convenient to have them
always at hand. The plethora of formats and magazine-reading platforms
(apps) is already becoming a problem,
and I'm sure that there will be some
kind of shakeout in the next couple
of years.
In this issue, we are calling for new
associate editors to join the magazine
team. Editorial boards play an important
role in our scientific community, and the
quality and impact of our publications is
driven by the talent and enthusiasm of
the people on these boards. The magazine has a relatively small board with six
associate editors, while our big brothers
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
and IEEE Transactions on Automation
Science and Engineering (T-ASE), have a
multilevel board with editors and associate editors. There are numerous benefits
of serving on an editorial board. First,
you get to have some real influence on
the direction of the publication through
decisions on special issues and by
recruiting articles for the publication.
This can and does have a direct effect
on the number of people who read and
cite the publication. Second, and particularly useful if you are an academic,
is that you get to see first hand how the
review process really works. You need
to find and remind reviewers to assess

SEPTEMBER 2011

the manuscript and ultimately make a crisp recommendation to the editor
or editor-in-chief about the
manuscript. For the magazine, a significant number of
articles fall into the "nearly but
not quite category," more formally, conditional accept, which can lead to several
iterations of the article going back and
forth between authors and the associate
editor, and their joint effort leads to great
publications. For the magazine, associate
editors might handle 12 articles per year,
generally within the technical areas that
they nominate. If you like reading the
magazine and want to help it in its mission of providing substantive, readable
technical articles about the practice of
robotics and automation, then please
apply. The details are on page 124.
The cover story for this issue is
about new meets old: a journey by four
autonomous vehicles along the Silk
Road, the ancient trade route from
China to Italy. The vehicles traveled
13,000 km within a period of three
months. This story launches another
new column that we call "From the
Field." If your project involves some
interesting or unusual field work that
you would like to share with our readers, then please contact me. We can get
your story into print quite quickly and
maybe even get it on the front cover.
This special issue is concerned with
the important problem of how we ensure
that our robots are correct, that is, how
do we create systems that always do what
we ask them to do. The articles discuss
how formal methods and techniques
from computer science can be applied to
robotics. As always, enjoy the issue, and
keep the articles coming my way.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2011
