The last two decades have seen spectacular growth in robotics and automation applications that extend well beyond simple and familiar manufacturing tasks (e.g., industrial robots performing the same repetitive tasks in highly structured factory environments). Commercial applications of robots performing more sophisticated tasks in less structured settings (e.g., warehouses, offices, hospitals and rehabilitation centers, etc.) are becoming more prevalent. We can expect a commensurate growth in the number of robotics and automation practitioners in the years to come, and RA-P intends to embrace this growing community. RA-P serves as a forum for practitioners to share and disseminate important research that currently lacks a dedicated venue.
RAS’ 2022 year-end membership statistics suggest that at least 36.5% of our current members are in practitioner roles, working for industry or government (the vast majority being in industry). Moreover, we can confidently project that in the coming years, as the field reaches maturity, the number of robotics and automation engineers working in practitioner roles will increasingly outpace those working in academia. Thus, nearly 40% of current RAS members lack a periodical targeted at their specific needs and interests.
RA-P is designed to address this gap, and it differs from the scope and editorial policies of the other RAS periodicals: IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (RA-M). Specifically, RA-P papers focus on successful application, technical, and business relevance of an idea to industry. The distinguishing factors of RA-P are a short paper format (maximum of four pages plus up to one page for descriptions of supplementary materials plus one page for references; “4+1+1”), extensive supplementary materials that will include artifacts that are useful to the practitioner, an emphasis on reproducibility of the results, and a review process that emphasizes practical impact on robotics technology over scientific novelty.
We encourage practitioners to submit their work; we expect one pool of contributors to be the large and growing community of practitioners who use the Robotics Operating System (ROS), ROSCon is an annual conference devoted to ROS that first started in 2012; it now regularly attracts hundreds of contributors and participants to its in-person conference. A large portion of the work presented at ROSCon is ideal for publication in RA-P. Whereas one can only upload code and manuals to ROS, an accompanying publication in RA-P would provide important technical details and other useful information about the code.
Furthermore, we encourage R&D engineers and scientists working for governments or at national labs to submit their work to RA-P. Such work would be immediately deployable and of high value to the community of practitioners.
Examples of such work includes:
RA-P is a dedicated forum for publishing and sharing such works with the larger community of robotics practitioners—and with academic researchers who wish to make an impact on real world systems and applications for the benefit of society.
