rss-topic-selection

name	rss-topic-selection
description	Use when judging whether a robotics project fits RSS (Robotics: Science and Systems), the single-track selective venue whose bar is a scientific claim about robotics, and when routing instead toward ICRA, IROS, CoRL, HRI, WAFR, T-RO, or IJRR based on claim type, evidence shape, and audience.

RSS Topic Selection

Decide whether the project belongs at RSS before any writing starts. RSS is the deliberately small, single-track robotics conference run under the RSS Foundation: every accepted paper is presented to the entire audience, so the program committee selects for work the whole field should hear about. That structure creates the venue's distinctive question, and this skill applies it.

The one question RSS asks

What does this paper claim about robotics — as science — that was not known before?

• A property proved about a class of planners; a measured bottleneck the community misattributed; a representation whose suitability for robot data is argued and then tested; a capability shown to transfer for a stated reason — all RSS-shaped.
• "We integrated known components and the system works well" is a legitimate result, but it is a systems demonstration, and at RSS it must still carry an insight: what does the integration reveal that component papers could not?
• The 2026 CFP welcomes both Science and Systems contributions; the shared requirement is a contribution statement a skeptic could test, not a capabilities inventory.

Routing table (from RSS's seat)

If the project is...	Verdict	Rationale
One sharp idea + evidence sized to it	RSS core	Single-track audience rewards concentrated novelty
A broad integrated platform, many components, no isolable insight	ICRA / IROS	Higher-volume multi-track programs absorb breadth
Learning-centric, benchmark-driven, embodiment secondary	CoRL	Robot-learning community is the right jury
Human-subject study as the main evidence	HRI	Study-design reviewing lives there
Pure algorithmic-foundations result, no experiment planned	WAFR or a theory venue	RSS still expects an empirical anchor
Needs 15+ pages of proofs or longitudinal experiments	T-RO / IJRR	Journal length; RSS caps at 8 pages excl. references (2026)

Three-part fit probe

Run these in order; failing any one is a re-route signal, not a death sentence:

1. Claim probe — write the contribution as a single declarative sentence with no system name in it. If the sentence is empty without the system name, the insight is not yet separable from the artifact.
2. Audience probe — RSS attendees span planning, perception, learning, control, and design. Would a session chair from a different subfield still care? If the result matters only inside one benchmark community, CoRL or a workshop is kinder.
3. Compression probe — the 2026 format is 8 pages excluding references, a ceiling the CFP explicitly frames as not a target. If the argument cannot be made crisply, the project may be a journal paper wearing conference formatting.

Worked micro-decision

A team has a legged robot climbing unstructured rubble using a new terrain-contact estimator plus an off-the-shelf controller. As a platform story it routes to ICRA. But if they can show the estimator's confidence signal predicts failures two footsteps ahead — and that this predictive structure, not raw accuracy, is what enables recovery — they now own a falsifiable claim about proprioceptive sensing, and RSS becomes the natural home. Same hardware, different paper.

Claim taxonomy: what an RSS-shaped assertion looks like

Concrete templates a project can aim to instantiate — each is falsifiable and system-name-free:

• Property claim — "planners of class C converge to suboptimal solutions; variant C' restores optimality." (The theorem-first lane.)
• Bottleneck claim — "in task family T, failures are dominated by factor F, not the factor the literature optimizes."
• Representation claim — "encoding the problem as R suits robot data because of property P, and evidence across tasks/platforms bears P out."
• Transfer claim — "capability K generalizes across E for stated reason R, and breaking R breaks the transfer."
• Measurement claim — "the community's standard metric M mis-ranks methods under condition X; here is the corrected instrument."

If none of these templates fits even loosely, the project is probably a systems report or an application study — respectable, but routed elsewhere.

Signals to weigh before committing the January slot

Signal	Reading
The team can state the claim without naming the robot	Strong RSS signal
The most exciting artifact is a video, not a finding	Demo gravity — reframe or reroute
Reviewers from planning AND learning would both engage	Whole-audience fit confirmed
Evidence exists only in simulation, claim mentions the world	Close the gap or scope the claim
The natural length is 14 pages	Journal-shaped; consider T-RO/IJRR
The idea would still matter if the success rate were 20% lower	Insight-driven, not benchmark-driven

Cycle discipline

• Scope emphasis and paper-type wording shift per edition; reread the current CFP (roboticsconference.org/information/cfp/) before the final call.
• Deadline geometry matters for routing: RSS 2026 closed in late January for a July conference; ICRA and CoRL sit elsewhere in the year — see rss-workflow for the full calendar argument.
• The Science/Systems paper-type wording was specific to the 2026 CFP; confirm the current cycle's categories before framing the contribution statement around them.

When RSS is the wrong home for excellent work

Fit failure is not quality failure. Recognize these honorable mismatches early:

• A superbly engineered platform whose lessons are in the integration details — the field needs it published, at ICRA/IROS length and breadth.
• A benchmark or dataset whose value is adoption, not insight — a track designed for artifacts (or a journal) serves it better than a single-track talk slot.
• A result whose proof apparatus dwarfs its empirical story — WAFR or a journal gives the proofs room the 8-page ceiling cannot.
• Work whose audience is one application community (agriculture, surgery, logistics) — the domain venue's reviewers can evaluate what RSS's generalists cannot.

Output format

[RSS verdict] core fit / fixable framing / re-route
[Scientific claim] <one sentence, no system name>
[Whole-audience hook] <why a distant subfield cares>
[Evidence-to-claim gap] <what is missing>
[If re-route] ICRA / IROS / CoRL / HRI / WAFR / T-RO / IJRR + one-line reason