IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

25th Anniversary of IEEE Robotics
and Automation Magazine:
From a Small Seed to a Great Plant
By Wolfram Burgard

he year 2019 is an important
one for the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society
(RAS). Not only does the RAS
turn 32 years old; the activities of our
members during its early stages have
led to a milestone anniversary: the
25th birthday of IEEE Robotics and
Automation Magazine, the first issue of
which was published in 1994.
Originally, the purpose of the magazine was to complement our prestigious
IEEE Transactions on Robotics as a
medium for creativity and real-world
applications of the theories developed
within or taken up by our Society.
However, our
magazine gained
speed relatively
Originally, the
qu i ck ly an d
purpose of the
soon became a
visionary voice
magazine was to
for our Society.
complement our
Looking back to
the themes of
prestigious IEEE
early issues, one
Transactions on
finds forwardlooking topics
Robotics.
such as service
robots (1994),
medical robots and automation (1995),
agricultural robotics (1996), underwater
robots (1997), and rescue robotics
(2002). In later years, IEEE Robotics
and Automation Magazine has continued to focus on topics that are of significant relevance, including deep sea
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2914380
Date of publication: 12 June 2019

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

JUNE 2019

robotics (2010), robot ethics
(2011), and drones (2012). It's
clear that the publication has
always focused on timely
and significant topics.
Key advantages of our
magazine are its broad distribution, its attractive and awardwinning layout, and the high quality
of its content. This has made it enormously influential. Several special
issues were so significant in their content that technical committees (TCs)
were formed based on their success,
such as the TCs on medical robotics,
assistive robotics, and mechanisms.
The magazine has also provided the
seeds for entire journals, such as Soft
Robotics and IEEE Transactions on
Medical Robotics and Bionics. Thus,
the magazine provides authors the
opportunity to cover timely as well as
risky topics and spur future research
activities and initiatives.
The magazine's articles are also
highly cited. In particular, our tutorials,
such as "Simultaneous Localization and
Mapping (SLAM)" by Tim Bailey and
Hugh Durrant-Whyte and "Multirotor
Aerial Vehicles" by Robert Mahony,
Vijay Kumar, and Peter Corke, have an
enormous attraction. My personal
experience with the magazine runs in
the same direction. "The Dynamic
Window Approach to Collision Avoidance," coauthored with my colleagues
Dieter Fox and Sebastian Thrun and
published in the magazine in 1997,
remains one of my most-cited papers.
Moreover, the magazine consistently

lands among the most highly
ranked IEEE magazines.
The magazine also serves
as a medium for news and
outreach. IEEE Spectrum has
picked up work published in
the magazine, including "Ocean
One: A Robotic Avatar for Oceanic
Discovery," from a research team lead
by Oussama Khatib, thus making the
Society's work available to an audience
going far beyond our Society.
Currently, the RAS is faced with a
major challenge based on the European Union requirement that publications growing out of publicly funded
projects need to be open source. This
affects not only our journal and the
letters but also the magazine, now
financed by subscriptions and advertising. Meeting these open source
requirements may necessitate a different model for the magazine, making it
available not only to Society members
but also to the public. This can be
regarded as a chance for attracting
more people to our field but also
means that we must introduce additional elements that make Society
membership attractive.
IEEE Robotics and Automation
Magazine is clearly one of our Society's success stories. Its 25th anniversary is a moment to thank all past
editors as well as the present editor for
their efforts to make this happen. Our
Society is currently working hard to
find ways to sustain this success for
the future.

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019

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