About Cyborg and Bionic Systems

Cyborg and Bionic Systems

Cyborg and Bionic Systems is an online-only, open-access journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as a Science Partner Journal, in affiliation with Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), with its editorial office at Beijing Institute of Technology Press, No. 5 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian, Beijing (e-ISSN 2692-7632). Launched with its first issue in January 2021 under editor-in-chief Toshio Fukuda, its mission is "to promote the knowledge interchange and hybrid system codesign between living beings and robotic systems." It publishes research across robotics, biomedical engineering and neuro-engineering — the sciences of machines that restore, augment or learn from living bodies.

A Science Partner Journal from Beijing

The Science Partner Journal programme is AAAS's mechanism for publishing open-access journals with partner institutions around the world, distributed alongside the Science family but editorially independent from it. AAAS states the arrangement for this title precisely: Cyborg and Bionic Systems "is editorially independent from the Science family of journals and BIT is responsible for all content published in the journal." AAAS announced the launch as one of a set of partner titles from BIT — Energy Material Advances and Space: Science & Technology were its stablemates — and the journal publishes under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. The structure is characteristic of a new generation of Chinese-institution journals: a Chinese university supplies the editors, community and content; a venerable Western scientific society supplies the platform, brand and global distribution.

Founding editor and editorial leadership

The founding editor-in-chief, Toshio Fukuda, is one of the most decorated roboticists of his generation. AAAS's launch announcement identifies him as a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, the 2020 president of IEEE, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Fukuda is known internationally for pioneering work in micro- and nanorobotics and in bio-robotic systems, which makes him a natural founding editor for a journal joining robotics to biology. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's account of the journal's launch names the deputy editors-in-chief as Qiang Huang of BIT — director of its intelligent robotics community — Abderrahmane Kheddar, Alois Knoll and Nigel Lovell, an international deputy team spanning Asia, Europe and Australia that mirrors the journal's intended authorship. The society also records the journal's brisk start: the first issue was published in January 2021, and by the time of its report thirty-two papers had been submitted, twenty published and two rejected.

Mission: interchange and codesign

The journal's mission statement, published by AAAS, repays close reading. Its mission "is to promote the knowledge interchange and hybrid system codesign between living beings and robotic systems. Living beings inspire improvements or novel robotics systems which, in turn, shall enable knowledge enhancement and extension of capabilities for living creatures." The relationship is deliberately two-way. In one direction, biology is the teacher: the locomotion of animals, the sensing of insects, the manipulation of hands become design principles for robots. In the other, robots are the instruments: prostheses, exoskeletons, implants and bio-hybrid devices that restore or extend what living bodies can do, and robotic systems that generate new knowledge about life itself. "Codesign" names the engineering philosophy that follows — living and artificial components designed together as one system, not bolted together afterwards.

What counts as a cyborg or bionic system

The journal's scope statement defines its territory through three kinds of research: bio-mechatronic robotic systems that help restore or augment the capabilities of humans and other living beings; hybrid technologies that mimic the mechanisms of life to create robots and systems that support and interact with humans and other species in varied environments; and scientific investigations into the principles of life in nature undertaken to advance bionic technologies. The IEEE technical community on cyborg and bionic systems, whose scope the journal shares, puts the underlying concept crisply: cyborg and bionic systems are concerned with the hybrid fusion of organic and biomechatronic body parts, integrating artificial components or technology such as bio-hybrid actuators and sensors, aiming to make an organism restored or enhanced beyond its original biological characteristics. The journal exists for the research literature of that fusion.

Scope: robotics

Within robotics, the journal's topic list names biomimetic robotics — robots modelled on living systems; wearable robotics at large, from exoskeletons to assistive devices; living systems–robotics systems symbiosis; and robotic system solutions for life-science monitoring and knowledge. Its special-issue calls fill in the texture: a call on multi-scale cyborg and bionic systems invited work on micro- and nanorobotics, rehabilitation robotics, prosthesis and exoskeleton robotics, medical surgical robots, biomimetic robots, cyber-physical bio-systems and computational intelligence methods, with guest editors from the international conference community on cyborg and bionic systems. Recent published highlights on its platform include work such as a multimodal amphibious robot powered by soft electrohydraulic flippers — soft, bio-inspired actuation being a signature technology of the field the journal serves.

Scope: neuro-engineering and biomedical engineering

The journal's second pillar is neuro-engineering: physiologically active bio-robotics and life-long bio-machine interfaces and coexistence — the science of connecting nervous systems to machines durably and safely. Its third pillar is biomedical engineering broadly: biomedical imaging; biomaterials, biosensors, bio-actuators and bio-reactors; and organ-on-chips and bio-assembly and tissue engineering. Special-issue topics extend this side of the scope to bio-cell assembly and tissue fabrication, micro biosensor and actuator fabrication, bio-energy sources and management, brain analysis and neural networks, and neuro-control and communication. Unusually for an engineering journal, the stated scope also includes the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of cyborg and bionic technologies — a recognition that technologies which merge bodies and machines raise questions that engineers alone cannot settle, and that a journal of the field should host that discussion.

Article types and open-access model

AAAS's launch announcement states that the journal publishes original Research Articles, Review Articles, Perspectives and Editorials, all peer reviewed — its scope statement specifies original, peer-reviewed articles based on fundamental science, applied science or their interaction. The journal is online only and fully open access under CC BY, so every article is free to read, reuse and build upon with attribution. For a young journal building a community from 2021, that openness, combined with AAAS distribution and inclusion in the Science Partner Journal collection, substitutes for the subscription-library presence that older journals rely on: any researcher, clinician or engineer in the world can read it without institutional access.

Indexing and early standing

Publisher and institute announcements record the journal's indexing in SCIE, EI, Scopus, PubMed, CSCD, DOAJ and Inspec — a broad sweep that places its biomedical content in PubMed, its engineering content in EI and Inspec, and the whole in the Web of Science and Scopus citation systems. That breadth matches its scope: a journal spanning robotics and tissue engineering needs to be findable by both communities. Its sponsoring ecosystem reinforces the position: the journal is affiliated with BIT's robotics establishment — Qiang Huang's Intelligent Robotics Institute at BIT is a leading centre for humanoid and bio-inspired robotics — and it is technically connected to the IEEE community and international conference on cyborg and bionic systems, whose activities the journal's scope mirrors.

Place in a new field's publishing

Cyborg and bionic systems is a field that named itself only in the 2010s, growing out of biorobotics, neural engineering and bio-hybrid systems research, and it acquired its conference series and IEEE technical structures in the same years that this journal launched. Cyborg and Bionic Systems therefore occupies a founding position: it is not a late entrant into an old literature but one of the field's defining publications, launched in 2021 with a mission statement that effectively defines the field's self-understanding — interchange and codesign between living beings and robotic systems. Published from Haidian, Beijing's university district, by Beijing Institute of Technology with AAAS, and edited by a former IEEE president, it is also a marker of where the field's centre of gravity lies: substantially in China, publishing in English, on an American society's platform.

Readership

The journal's readers are roboticists working on bio-inspired, wearable and medical machines; neural and biomedical engineers building interfaces, sensors and implants; tissue engineers and bio-assembly researchers; and the clinicians, ethicists and regulators who follow human–machine integration. Its ELSI strand widens that readership deliberately. For all of them, Cyborg and Bionic Systems offers a single open-access venue in which a prosthesis paper, a brain–machine interface study and a soft biomimetic robot are not strangers but contributions to one shared project — the hybrid future of living beings and the machines designed with, and for, them.