Also Nature did decline our manuscript yesterday, though they at least made the effort to refer to the conents of our paper in their rejection e-mail and gave us the impression that they made some effort to arrive at this conclusion. The reasons given for the rejection were a lack of believe in its scientific impact as well as no confidence in the sufficent and striking advance which would excite a broader audience.

So, we still have no substantial reviewer feedback, but the next step is before us. As a sneak peak here is a yet uncommented illustration of our story

Almost precisely after two weeks from the date of submission the editor of Science came back to us saying at our paper has not been selected for publication but offered to transfer it to a related journal of the science family.

However, at this point we opted to try Nature first, which required us to rewrite the abstract in a quite interesting style, change from American to British spelling and rewrite our letter to the editor. We have submitted yestereday and been assigned to an undisclosed editor today. Again, fingers crossed!

The old, slightly embarassing feeling that the manuscript tracker is playing with you. This Sunday the status changed back to “to advisor” and this morning it is again “under evaluation”. A Science help document, quite buried on the internet, suggests that there are more status items to pass.

This process has been expected to be fast but its moving along at a stunning pace. Sometime last night we have been assigned our requested editor, the editor had set the status to “to advisor” which I assume involved the reviewing editors. The status has now changed to “under evaluation” which should have triggered the in-depth review by two outside reviewers. Keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned!

Not about science in general but about Science Magazine, one of the high-impact, general purpose scientific journals. My notion of science is “When you do bad science you are not getting into Science. If you are doing great science, you are probably still not getting into Science.“

However, I have submitted a research article manuscript to Science magazine yesterday and I would like to take you on the journey with me.

Finally, after first submitting our article to IEEE Transactions on Robotics on December, 13th 2013, after 3 reviews and one change in paper format our new article “Exciting engineered passive dynamics in a bipedal robot” is finally online and will be published in the upcoming issue.

ATRIAS also recently pushed the record for fast walking to 2.1m/s (7.6km/h) – great work at the DRL.

The control objective for bipedal gait is a matter of debate in the biomechanics community. Model driven studies suggested stability in the sense of aiming for returning to a previous steady-state after perturbation. Experiments with birds, the largest population of bipedal animals, in combination with a simulation study suggests that the control objective might be something else. Check out our new article in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

It took a while, but the paper on spring-mass walking with the ATRIAS robot is resubmitted to ‘IEEE Transaction on Robotics’. The new video can be found on the ATRIAS page in this blog.