Celebrating
RAM
’s 20th Anniversary
By Roslyn SnyderIEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine and Its Growth
ith this issue, IEEE Robot-ics & Automation Maga-zine (RAM) begins its 20th year of publication. In 1994, when the first issue went to all mem-bers of the IEEE Robotics & Automa-tion Society (RAS), the goal of the magazine was to complement the Soci-ety’s prestigious scholarly transactions, then titled IEEE Transactions on
Robot-ics & Automation, by presenting
cre-ative approaches to applying mature theories to complex real-world systems. In addition, RAM was intended to fill the gap between scholarly journals and trade and hobbyist publications and to inform nonacademic professionals in robotics & automation about exciting new developments coming out of research laboratories.
RAM grew out of the IEEE Robotics
& Automation Newsletter (R&A),
which was founded in 1987 by the IEEE Council on Robotics & Automa-tion with Wesley Snyder as an editor and Rosalyn Snyder as a staff assistant. When Wesley Snyder stepped down in 1990, the R&A Council had just become the IEEE’s newest Technical Society, and R&A had grown substan-tially in size and substance. Due to its growth, Society President Art Sander-son suggested to the Administrative Committee (AdCom) that it was time to think about upgrading the newslet-ter to a magazine.
Succeeding Wesley Snyder as the newsletter editor was Michael Leahy, a young U.S. Air Force Captain, who received his Ph.D. degree from the Rensselaer Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dr. George Saridis and was a professor at the Air
Force Institute of Technology. In 1992, R&A was publishing reports from robotics & automation labora-tories all over the world and occa-sional technical reports in addition to the IEEE and Society news and conference announcements, and had started carrying paid advertising. The RAS Publications Committee, chaired by Robert Kelley of Rensse-laer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Leahy, decided it was time to transi-tion R&A to a real magazine.
Efforts on New Publication
Active planning for the new publication got underway in December 1992, when the AdCom approved a proposal from Leahy and Kelley to change R&A into an official IEEE magazine. Over the next six months, Kelley, Leahy, and Rosalyn Snyder, with assistance from RAS President T.J. Tarn, Vice President for Financial Activities T.S. (Steve) Hsia, and Secretary David Orin worked hard. The Society had to present a formal proposal to show that the RAS was pre-pared to satisfy all of the IEEE’s require-ments for a new publication.
The Society also had to convince other IEEE Societies that the new pub-lication would be complementary, not competing, and would not trespass on their fields of interest. RAS had to demonstrate that the new magazine could attract high-quality technical fea-tures and could recruit qualified volun-teers to serve as editors, columnists, and reviewers. Last, but by no means least, the Society would have to show that it would be able to financially support the magazine for three years without receiving any income from IEEE Xplore downloads or nonmem-ber and institutional subscriptions. This involved getting bids from the IEEE and other outside vendors, mak-ing decisions about paper quality and use of color, setting advertising rates— all kinds of decisions that bore little relation to robotics & automation.
At the same time, Leahy was busy organizing the editorial board, soliciting submission, and planning the depart-ments in anticipation of publishing the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2012.2236271
Date of publication: 8 March 2013
Announcement for the new RA Magazine.
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MARCH 2013 t IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE t
first issue in March 1994. Rosalyn Sny-der contacted potential advertisers from book publishers and robotics manufac-turers and suppliers.
The last hurdle was getting the final approval for the new magazine, which was granted at the June 1993 meeting of the IEEE Board of Directors. Work on the first issue went into high gear to meet the IEEE magazine Production Department’s deadline, which was no easy task given that manuscripts were still submitted by post or courier and not everyone, even in the academic community, had access to e-mail.
The First Issue of RAM
Finally, the March 1994 issue appeared with a bright cover featuring a graphical interface from Sandia National Labora-tories that enabled operators to see and review robotic programs before they were implemented. The 48 pages included three technical articles, “PPA—A Precise Data-Driven Compo-nent Tool” by David C. Loose and James C. Colson, “Robotica: Mathematical Package for Robot Analysis” by Mark W. Spong and John F. Netherly, and “Review of the Robotica Software Pack-age for Robotic Manipulators” by Dean L. Schneider. John Canny and Ken Goldberg contributed a “Research Forum” column titled “A RISC Approach to Robotics.” In addition to letters from Editor-in-Chief Leahy and new RAS President Richard Klafter, col-umns included “Conference Reports,” “Student Scene” (featuring a description by Robert Michelson of the Aerial Robotics Competition), a new product review by Robert Kelley, Ph.D. Abstracts, (Ole Jacob Sordalen and Zhen-Lei Zhou), a report from the Soci-ety’s seven technical committees, a pro-file of Jill Crisman, the first female RAS AdCom member, and “Society News,” reporting the results of the AdCom elec-tion and the RAS-members-elected IEEE Fellow. The first issue also featured three cover advertisements and several inside advertisements. By the next issue, there would be additional advertise-ments, with a waiting list for cover spots to come open. Although the magazine was not intended for publishing
scholarly papers, articles were cited by others often enough to rank among the top four or five robotics publications listed in Thomson Reuters Journal
Cita-tion Reports.
Improvements in RAM
In 1998, another RPI graduate, Kimon Valavanis from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, took the helm of RAM. His term saw steady increases in the number and diversity of submissions. He was followed in 2006 by Stefano Stramigioli, of the University of Twente, The Nether-lands, who streamlined the submis-sion and review process by moving to the Paper Plaza Web-based submis-sion and review system. Stramigioli also led a major overhaul of the RAS Web site that had been originally established in 2000. The new site fea-tured a PHP-based interactive site, which had many new features includ-ing online access to the RAS member directory and the transactions and magazine submission pages, direct links to conference Web sites, Society minutes, and reports.
In 2009, Stramigioli became the RAS vice president elect for Member Activities, and Peter Corke from Australia’s CSIRO, and later the Queensland University of Technology, became the fourth RAM editor-in-chief. Corke, whose 1997 RAM article, “A Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB,” continues to be among the magazine’s most frequently downloaded features. He oversaw a redesign of the magazine layout that included photographic front covers and digital delivery, intro-duced many new columns, and has established a close working relation-ship with some of IEEE Spectrum’s
writers. See pages 104–108 for pictures of all the covers from 1994–2012.
After Rosalyn Snyder retired in 2012, Rachel O. Warnick took on the role of editorial assistant for the maga-zine, and RAM is still going strong with more to come.
More About the Past Editors
Michael Leahy is currently the chief
architect for Northrop Grumman
Aerospace Systems Advanced Pro-grams and Technology Division. He is responsible for establishing the architectural framework standard to ensure a consistent and competitive level of design, development, and transition for each capability. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman, he had a distinguished 27-year career with the U.S. Air Force and made signifi-cant contributions to the advance-ment of aerospace technology and advanced systems before retiring as a colonel in 2007. He has received numerous honors, including the AIAA 2010 Hap Arnold Award and the Association of Unmanned Vehi-cles 2000 International Pioneer Award.
Kimon Valavanis is currently a
pro-fessor and chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Denver and is also a guest professor at the Univer-sity of Zagreb, Croatia. His other positions have included the Univer-sity of South Florida (2003–2008), the Technical University of Crete (1999-2003), where he was a profes-sor and director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Robotics, University of Southwestern Louisiana (1991–1999), where he held the A-CIM/[TC]2/Regents Professorship in Manufacturing, and the director of the Robotics Laboratory at North-eastern University (1987–1990). He has published over 300 book chap-ters, technical journal papers, and refereed conference papers and has coauthored several books. He is cur-rently editor in chief of the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems.
Stefano Stramigioli is an associate
professor at the Drebbel Institute of Mechatronics of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. His main interests lie in the geometrical approach to physical systems and control and in particular robotics. He is the author of Modeling and IPC Control of Interactive
Mechani-cal Systems, Springer 2001, and
1994—2012
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