Robots have been a focus in technology for decades, but they and basic science, and for that matter everyday life, have largely been non-overlapping. That’s changed over the last few years, as robotics and other fields have come to inform and improve each other, and robots have begun to affect our lives.
So the only surprise in the news that the prestigious journal group Science has established a discrete Robotics imprint is that they didn’t do it earlier.
Editor Guang-Zhong Yang and president of the National Academy of Sciences Marcia McNutt introduce the journal:
In a mere 50 years, robots have gone from being a topic of science fiction to becoming an integral part of modern society. They now are ubiquitous on factory floors, build complex deep-sea installations, explore icy worlds beyond the reach of humans, and assist in precision surgeries… With this growth, the research community that is engaged in robotics has expanded globally. To help meet the need to communicate discoveries across all domains of robotics research, we are proud to announce that Science Robotics is open for submissions.
Today brought the inaugural issue of Science Robotics, Vol.1 Issue 1, and it’s a whopper. Despite having only a handful of articles, each is deeply interesting and shows off a different aspect of the robotics research world, though by no means do these few articles hit all the major regions of the field.
At the bottom of the “mission and scope” section are some interesting reviews of areas the journal is hoping to accept submissions for, so if you want to catch up on soft robotics, nano-scale stuff or bio-inspired/biomimetic robots, you could do worse.