--- name: icra-workflow description: Use when planning an ICRA submission calendar end to end — the September paper deadline, the two video-attachment windows, winter review silence, late-January notification, March camera-ready, and the May/June conference — or when interleaving a fallback RA-L or IROS plan around the single annual ICRA shot. --- # ICRA Workflow ICRA runs on one unforgiving annual clock: papers due mid-September, decisions at the end of January, camera-ready in early March, conference late May or early June. There is no abstract-registration step, no rebuttal window to buy time, and the video attachment has its own separate deadlines that surprise first-time authors. This skill turns that clock into a working plan with named owners and fallbacks. ## The verified 2026-cycle clock (anchor, not prophecy) | Milestone | ICRA 2026 (Vienna) actual | Owner in your plan | |---|---|---| | Submission site opens (PaperPlaza) | July 15, 2025 | corresponding author | | Video window 1 | Aug 5 – Sep 9, 2025 | experiments lead | | Paper deadline | Sep 15, 2025, 23:59 Pacific | everyone | | Video window 2 (post-deadline) | Sep 17 – 22, 2025 | experiments lead | | Review period (no author contact) | Oct 2025 – Jan 2026 | — | | Accept/reject notification | Jan 31, 2026 | corresponding author | | Camera-ready deadline | Mar 6, 2026 | writing lead | | Conference | Jun 1 – 5, 2026 | presenting author | ICRA 2027 is announced for **May 24-28, 2027, COEX, Seoul**; its paper deadline was not yet posted at check time (2026-07-08) — plan against mid-September 2026 as the working hypothesis and verify at `2027.ieee-icra.org` before circulating dates. ## Backward planning from the September deadline Robotics papers die on hardware time, not writing time. Count backward: - **T minus 16 weeks (late May):** freeze the task definition and success metric. Changing the task after this point invalidates collected trials. - **T minus 12 weeks:** platform bring-up complete; baselines running on the real system, not just in simulation. Order spare parts now — a burned motor driver in August is a cycle-killer. - **T minus 8 weeks:** main-method trials underway with the logging harness from `icra-reproducibility` already in place; begin capturing raw video during every session so the attachment is assembled from real footage, not re-staged runs. - **T minus 4 weeks:** full experimental table exists in draft form; writing becomes the critical path. Cut experiments, not analysis quality. - **T minus 1 week:** paper into the `icra-submission` audit; video edited to the 180-second cap; PaperPlaza metadata entered; PDF compliance checked. - **Deadline week:** upload at least 24 hours early. PaperPlaza slows measurably in the final hours of Pacific-time deadline day. ## The winter silence and how to spend it Between September and late January the pipeline is closed to authors — no status pings, no updated PDFs, no supplementary additions. Productive uses: 1. Extend experiments toward the camera-ready and toward the journal version. 2. Prepare the RA-L conversion of the same line of work (a *different* paper — never the identical manuscript, which would be dual submission). 3. Draft the workshop or late-breaking submission for the same conference; those calls typically open in winter with their own deadlines. 4. Budget conference logistics early: Vienna 2026 drew 8,000+ attendees and Seoul 2027 anticipates around 10,000, so housing and visas (Schengen, then Korea) need lead time measured in months, not weeks. ## Fallback lattice ```text Sep ICRA deadline missed or reject in Jan? ├─ RA-L: rolling submission, ~3-month first decision, │ accepted letters transferable to a later RAS conference stage ├─ IROS: deadline typically ~March 1 for an autumn conference ├─ CoRL: learning-centric work, deadline typically ~June └─ ICRA workshops / late-breaking: same trip, lighter review, non-archival or lightly archival — check the current call Rule: pick the fallback BEFORE notification day, so a reject converts to a resubmission in days, not months. ``` ## Interleaving the RA-L track without fouling either Teams running both roads (see `icra-topic-selection`) need sequencing rules: - A given manuscript occupies exactly one pipeline at a time; the *project* may feed both only as genuinely different papers (different claims, different evidence) — when in doubt, assume the overlap is too high. - The efficient braid: system paper → direct ICRA in September; the follow-up with the extended evaluation → RA-L in the spring, aiming its 270-day presentation-transfer window at the *next* ICRA or IROS. - Put the RA-L first-decision estimate (~3 months from submission) on the same calendar as the ICRA milestones so revision labor never collides with camera-ready labor in the same fortnight. ## Failure modes this calendar prevents - **The video afterthought.** Teams discover the attachment windows after the paper deadline and miss window 2; the paper then competes without the single most persuasive artifact a robotics reviewer sees. - **Hardware heroics in September.** Last-fortnight soldering produces the thin trial counts that `icra-experiments` flags as a leading rejection cause. - **Notification-day scramble.** No pre-chosen fallback means the January reject ages for a month while the team debates; the March IROS deadline then arrives with no revision done. - **Camera-ready compression panic.** The 2026 final limit was 8 pages *including* references, while submissions ran 6+2; merging reviewer-requested additions into a tighter effective budget takes the two weeks the calendar reserves for it. ## Date-verification ritual Every date in this file is a 2026-cycle anchor. Before propagating any of them into a team plan: 1. Open the current year-site (`.ieee-icra.org`) contribute/CFP pages. 2. Confirm the deadline's **time zone** — 2026 used Pacific, not AoE. 3. Confirm both video windows; they move independently of the paper deadline. 4. Record what you verified and when in the project log, so the next teammate does not re-trust a stale screenshot. ## Team checkpoint template ```text [Cycle] ICRA — deadline (verify at .ieee-icra.org) [Today minus deadline] weeks [Hardware status] platform up? spares? trial count vs plan [Evidence status] baselines real/sim, main table % complete [Video status] raw footage hours banked, edit owner, window dates [Writing status] section owners, page budget vs 6+2 [Fallback] pre-selected: yes/no [Next checkpoint] ```