--- name: rss-related-work description: Use when positioning an RSS (Robotics: Science and Systems) submission within the literature — covering the robotics-conference lanes (RSS/ICRA/IROS/CoRL) plus journals and ML venues, handling fast-moving arXiv concurrency in robot learning, keeping self-references double-blind, and turning related work into claim-sharpening contrasts. --- # 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: ```text 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 ```text [Lane coverage] rss-line / icra-iros / corl / journals / enabling -> gaps [Nearest neighbors] <3-5 papers, each with a contrast sentence> [Concurrent preprints] neutral handling> [Self-citation sweep] third-person ok / platform-chain risk found [Overlap declarations] [Novelty sentence] ```