Your Magazine [From the Editor's Desk]

It is a real privilege and a terrific opportunity for me to start my term as IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM) editor-in-chief with this September issue. I will serve for five years, and throughout my term, I will always rely on your opinions, criticisms, suggestions, and any other inputs that could help me to further improve your level of satisfaction as contributors and readers of the magazine. This is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s (RAS’s) official magazine, which means that, as RAS members, it is your magazine—an important service that the Society provides to all of you, and to which you can help shape to fulfill your actual needs of communicat ing your research, products, and events within and outside our community. My main personal commitment and highest priority is to guarantee the fastest possible submission-to-publication time, as compatible with the quality of the review process that is required by a top robotics and automation publication like RAM. As you know, RAM guarantees rapid posting of all papers that have successfully passed the peer review process, upon completion of an additional, dedicated editing effort. Each paper, in fact, is fully edited by our professional team to give your presentation that special touch that you can easily and immediately perceive in any of our articles. RAM also devotes up to three of our four issues per year to Special Issues/Focused Sections. This means that only one issue per year is fully devoted to regular submissions, which are a significant portion of our total submissions because of the good reputation of this journal in the robotics and automation field. In other words, when submitting an article to RAM, you may have to wait a few months longer than you would for other publications to see your work printed, but the high quality of the final presentation, the unique opportunity to directly share your achievements with all of the members of our RAS community, and the top-level ranking of RAM will definitely reward your patience. In addition, as with all other IEEE publications, you have the possibility to select the Open Access option when submitting your articles. This will make the time needed for rapid posting of your papers exactly the same as the time needed for completing the Open Access publication process. I will mainly use this column to keep you up to date with the latest ongoing initiatives promoted by this magazine. I believe that RAM is the ideal laboratory and incubator of innovations for RAS publications: it has been so in the past, and I would love to keep the same level of quality as my great predecessors. I believe Stefano Stramigioli and Peter Corke, with whom I had the privilege to work as an associate editor of RAM, did an incredible job in amplifying the impact and shaping the contents of this magazine, fully inline with its scope. Real-world robotics papers, high-quality tutorials and surveys, special issues on emerging topics, and reports on the latest achievements are the typical contributions sought for publication in RAM. In addition, I am already discussing some new ideas with the editorial board and the IEEE to keep this magazine at the forefront of both robotics and automation research and publication services. You will hear about my ideas in the near future for sure! Real-world robotics