According to the special section entitled 'Robust design and analysis of electric machines and drives', to be published in IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, the authors present an introduction to tolerance analysis, robust optimization, and measures to improve the reliability of electric machines, power electronics and drives, and their robust control in general. A comprehensive review of modeling uncertainties and evaluating robustness and reliability based measures is presented. In addition, techniques facilitating solving dedicated optimization scenarios are introduced. The most recent research activities will be illustrated. The article thus enables to easily catch up with the state-of-the-art in these fields and to take notice of ongoing and future work.