Iros review process

IROS Review Process

Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current CFP, PaperPlaza instructions, and any reviewer guidelines before making process claims — IROS review mechanics are set per edition by the co-sponsoring IEEE/RSJ committee.

Process model

• Submission and review run on PaperPlaza. Papers are handled by an Associate Editor under an Editor, who assign and synthesize reviews; there is no standing editor-in-chief for the conference.
• Reviewers are embodied-systems researchers. They weigh hardware, task distributions, trial counts, failure analysis, and sim-to-real honesty at least as much as a clean plot.
• The video is read as evidence: many reviewers watch it before the text, so a weak or misleading video colors the whole review.
• The 2026 cycle is double-anonymous; author identity should not be inferable from text, figures, or video.
• Accepted papers go to IEEE Xplore, so camera-ready compliance and the copyright form matter as much as the initial decision.

The no-rebuttal consequence

IROS has traditionally delivered reviews together with the decision and no author-response phase. This changes strategy fundamentally: you cannot answer an objection after the fact, so every foreseeable objection must be pre-answered in the paper and the video. The video functions as the only asynchronous "rebuttal" a reviewer gets — a shown-and-labeled failure disarms the "did it really work?" reviewer before they can write it down. Confirm the current cycle's policy before assuming a rebuttal exists or does not.

Scoring leverage table

Review dimension	What raises it	What sinks it
Technical merit	A system that integrates cleanly and runs under a real constraint	A component swap dressed up as a system
Evidence	Trials, resets, failures, and a stated sim-to-real gap	A hero demo with no counts and no failures
Clarity	A system diagram and figures that carry the argument	An argument that needs an appendix IROS does not provide
Reproducibility	Hardware ledger, logs, honest availability	"Code coming soon" with no specs

Stage-by-stage realism

• Submission to notification is a long silence (spring to mid-June in 2026); there is no interaction to manage, only evidence to preserve for camera-ready.
• Notification arrives with the reviews; with no rebuttal, the lever is the camera-ready revision and the meta-review's requested changes.
• A single unresolved "I don't believe the robot did this" concern outweighs several resolved clarity nits, because embodied credibility is the currency here.

Reject-to-next-venue realism

Because IROS is on the fall calendar, a reject can route to the next ICRA, to CoRL, or to an RA-L submission with revision — decide by the reviews' substance, not by prestige.

Reading a review packet:
  [ ] separate "the robot didn't convince me" from "writing unclear"
  [ ] list objections that a camera-ready edit can address vs cannot
  [ ] note every evidence gap the reviewers named for the next run
  [ ] pick the re-route (ICRA / CoRL / RA-L) if rejected, by substance

Output format

[Current stage] submitted / in-review / notified / camera-ready
[Decision actors] <Associate Editor / Editor / reviewers>
[Likely leverage] <integration / evidence / clarity / reproducibility>
[No-rebuttal implication] <what must be pre-answered in paper + video>
[Next move] <camera-ready edit or re-route>