The scope of this journal is to publish peer-reviewed articles that provide a timely and concise account of innovative research ideas and application results, reporting significant theoretical findings and application case studies in areas of robotics and automation.

The primary goal of RA-L is to better serve the RAS membership and the robotics and automation community at large, which has strongly increased in number and productivity, by providing more capacity for high-quality, fully reviewed journal papers. Additional goals of RA-L are to provide a publication process that is complementary to the existing evolutionary process from RAS conferences into journal papers and to improve the efficiency of the peer-review process.

• RA-L publishes papers reporting on innovative ideas and unpublished results that need to be rapidly published. To this purpose, RA-L provides a final decision on any manuscript within 6 months from submission (average sub-to-epub time is around 4 months)
• Papers are six pages long, with at most two extra pages allowed at a charge, and allows open access for those authors who require it.
• The review cycle follows the highest standards of IEEE periodicals.
• Each paper is assigned to a Senior Editor, an Associate Editor, and at least two independent reviewers.
• The review process may also include a fast revise-and-resubmit process, upon which the Letters Editorial Board (LEB) makes a final decision.
• Accepted papers are electronically archived on IEEE Xplore, and are made available for early access by readers only few days after submission of the final version, while an edited and XML-tagged version for searching and indexing is made available soon after.
• RA-L is an electronic-only journal.
• For more details, please see the Presentation from the 2015 RAS Town Hall

A unique feature of RA-L is the opportunity for authors to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal and present the same paper at the annual flagship conferences of RAS, including the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), and the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots,  IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics and other conferences.  Papers that are accepted at RA-L have the opportunity to be transferred to these conferences within 270 days of the paper’s acceptance.

In conclusion, one may wonder: Where should I submit my work in the new RAS panorama? Here are a few tips.

If you are interested in a journal publication, then you should consider:

• Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) for rapid, concise reports
• Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) and Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) for more mature and in-depth treatments
• Robotics and Automation Magazine (RA-M) for more accessible, wider diffusion papers.

If you are interested in presenting your work at one of the selected conferences, then you should consider RA-L  if you have a stable manuscript and you want it to have a chance to appear quickly in an IEEE journal. You should instead submit to the Conference directly if your manuscript is finalized just at the Conference deadline, or if you plan to evolve the contents of that work later on into a full-blown submission to other prestigious RAS Journals, such as T-RO, T-ASE, and RA-M.