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

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>