Rss related work

RSS Related Work

Position the paper so its claim's novelty is checkable. At a selective single-track venue, related work is not a courtesy section — it is where the Area Chair verifies that the field genuinely lacks what the paper asserts.

The lanes an RSS reviewer expects covered

Lane	Where it lives	The question your coverage must answer
RSS's own line	roboticsproceedings.org (free) / dblp	What did the last 2-3 editions say on this problem?
The IEEE siblings	ICRA / IROS proceedings	Is this "known at the mega-conferences" already?
Robot learning	CoRL, ML venues	If learning-based: what does the CoRL line already show?
Journal depth	T-RO, IJRR, AURO	Does a journal version of this idea predate you?
Enabling fields	vision/ML/control theory venues	Is the core mechanism imported? Say so and cite the source

The venue's own lane deserves priority: RSS proceedings are open-access, so "we couldn't access it" is never a defense, and reviewers often are the recent-edition authors under the anonymity veil.

Contrast, don't catalogue

Rewrite tour-style paragraphs into claim-anchored contrasts:

• Weak: "Much work has studied cloth manipulation [3,7,12,19]."
• Strong: "Prior bimanual systems couple contact timing with trajectory optimization [3,7]; we show decoupling them isolates the dominant failure source, which [3,7] cannot attribute."

One contrast sentence per nearest neighbor; the neighbor set is usually 3-5 papers, not 30. Everything else earns at most a grouped citation.

arXiv concurrency in a fast field

Robot learning moves preprint-first, so the January deadline lands amid unrefereed neighbors:

• Cite visible preprints neutrally. A same-quarter arXiv paper with your idea is a fact reviewers will know; acknowledging it with a technical distinction beats hoping nobody noticed.
• Do not claim priority races. "Concurrent work [x] differs in A and B" is verifiable; "we were first" is not.
• Cutoff hygiene: state comparisons against the literature as of submission; the rebuttal (if invited) can acknowledge anything that landed after.

Double-blind self-citation

• Cite your own prior papers in third person, exactly like a stranger's work.
• The robotics-specific trap is the platform chain: citing the paper that built your exact rig, in a sentence that only makes sense if it is yours, de-anonymizes as surely as a name. Describe hardware provenance generically at submission and restore attribution at camera-ready.
• Unpublished own work needed for the argument: include as anonymized supplement, not as a citation to a findable preprint.

Coverage protocol (an hour, well spent)

A repeatable sweep that catches the misses reviewers catch:

1. roboticsproceedings.org: open the last three volumes' tables of contents;
   keyword-scan titles (all free, no login).
2. dblp.org/db/conf/rss: confirm venue attribution for anything you plan to
   call "prior RSS work" — folklore misfiles ICRA papers as RSS constantly.
3. dblp author pages of your 3-5 nearest neighbors: find their newest
   follow-ups, including the IROS/CoRL versions of ideas you know from RSS.
4. arXiv: search your claim's key nouns filtered to the last 12 months;
   list hits in a concurrency ledger with a one-line distinction each.
5. Reverse pass: for each baseline you compare against, read who cites it
   *this year* — that citation neighborhood is your reviewer pool's memory.

Common positioning failures at this venue

Failure	How it reads to the AC
Only ML venues cited for a manipulation claim	Authors don't know the robotics line
The venue's own recent papers absent	Didn't check the free proceedings
Nearest neighbor cited but never contrasted	The delta may not exist
"First to..." with a findable counterexample	Credibility damage spreads to the claims
60-reference tour, 3 contrasts	Coverage substituting for positioning

Overlap declarations

• Prior workshop or abstract versions of this work: verify the current CFP's stance and declare rather than gamble — workshop archival status varies.
• Same-cycle submissions to sibling venues with shared content are the routing hazard of the packed robotics calendar (rss-workflow); resolve before, not after, the abstract deadline.

Vignette: positioning a contact-rich manipulation claim

A paper claims contact-timing decoupling explains bimanual failure rates. Its neighbor set after the protocol sweep: a recent RSS paper on bimanual planning (contrast: couples timing and motion, cannot attribute failures), an ICRA system with higher raw success on one garment class (contrast: no mechanism isolation, so the number and the claim answer different questions), a CoRL policy-learning line (contrast: learns timing implicitly; this paper measures it explicitly), and a T-RO stability analysis (contrast: quasi-static assumption excludes the regime studied here). Four contrasts, four sentences, and the novelty claim is now checkable by any reviewer who knows one of the four lanes.

Output format

[Lane coverage] rss-line / icra-iros / corl / journals / enabling -> gaps
[Nearest neighbors] <3-5 papers, each with a contrast sentence>
[Concurrent preprints] <item -> neutral handling>
[Self-citation sweep] third-person ok / platform-chain risk found
[Overlap declarations] <none / listed>
[Novelty sentence] <the claim's delta, one line>