Preparing Your Manuscript

Submitted papers must be written in good understandable English. It is not the job of reviewers, associate editors or editor-in-chief to correct English spelling and grammar, and poorly written papers stand a much lower chance of being accepted. Authors wishing for assistance in this regard may consider using the IEEE proof editing service (fee based).

The submitted paper is submitted as a PDF file for review. There is no format or template requirement and you may use any tool at all (LaTeX, Word etc.) to prepare the PDF file. You might like to use the IEEE PDF checker to ensure that your file is compliant, and some hints on creating compliant PDF files using LaTeX. The IEEE Author Digital Tool Box has many helpful links including tools for correct reference formats.

A technical feature (regular or special issue) should meet the following requirements:

• No more than 9 magazine pages, so aim for no more than 4500 words of text
• No more than 10 equations
• No more than 20 references, unless it is a survey article
• No more than 10 figures
• Include at least one high quality color photograph of the robotic system
• Figures, tables, schematics, plots are very welcome
• PLEASE NOTE: figures need to be submitted in high-resolution, high-quality format such as JPEG, TIFF, EPS, etc. PDF files are not supported.

Be aware that mandatory page charges of USD 250 apply for every published page beyond 9 pages with a maximum 7 extra pages at a charge. If your paper has multimedia material then this should be prepared according to the guidelines and submitted at the same time as your PDF file.

If you have not previously submitted a paper to the magazine, you are strongly encouraged to peruse recent issues to familiarize yourself with the style and technical level of typical articles.

Word Count

Most authors are accustomed to writing to a page limit rather than a word limit. Since all magazine articles are retype set it is better to aim for a word limit, however unusual or odd this might feel. If you're working in Word then life is easy, use the word count option from the Tools menu. If you're using LaTeX then your options are:

• detex paper.tex | wc -w
• pdf2ascii paper.pdf | wc –w

The former won't pick up references, both will count equations, but you shouldn't be having too many of these anyway.