--- name: icra-writing-style description: Use when drafting or tightening an ICRA manuscript — leading with the robot task and physical constraint, compressing a systems story into 6 IEEE two-column pages, writing figure-first for skimming reviewers, quantifying instead of demo-speak, and keeping notation consistent across kinematics, control, and learning sections. --- # ICRA Writing Style An ICRA paper is read by a tired Associate Editor and two or three reviewers who between them skim hundreds of robotics PDFs each autumn. The style that survives this is figure-first, task-first, and ruthlessly quantitative. This skill rewrites drafts toward that shape inside the 6-content-page envelope. ## Lead with the task, not the technique The strongest ICRA openings establish, within the first column: what the robot must do, why physics or uncertainty makes that hard, what the paper contributes, and what the headline number is. - Weak: "Deep reinforcement learning has shown impressive results in recent years..." (parent-field throat-clearing; tells a robotics reviewer nothing). - Strong: "Regrasping a tool that slips mid-task takes a torque-controlled arm out of its planned contact state; we present a reflex layer that detects slip onset from joint-torque residuals within 12 ms and recovers 87% of failed grasps that the nominal planner abandons." The second version names the task, the physical difficulty, the mechanism, and two measured numbers — before the reader decides whether to keep reading. ## The six-page budget | Section | Target share | Notes | |---|---|---| | Title/abstract/intro | ~1.0 page | contribution bullets end the intro | | Related work | ~0.5 page | positioning, not survey; see `icra-related-work` | | Method / system | ~1.75 pages | one architecture figure carries the load | | Experimental setup | ~0.75 page | platform, task, protocol, metrics | | Results + analysis | ~1.5 pages | tables and failure analysis | | Conclusion + limitations | ~0.5 page | honest limits read as strength | Two structural rules follow from the budget. First, there is no appendix escape valve: unlike ML venues, the 2026 rules give no unlimited supplementary PDF, so anything reviewers need must fit the body (the video can *show* but not *state* essential content — see `icra-supplementary`). Second, derivations longer than half a column belong in a cited technical report or the eventual journal version, with only the result and assumptions in the paper. ## Figure-first discipline Robotics reviewers reconstruct papers from figures before reading prose. Audit the figure chain alone: does Fig. 1 (task + platform), Fig. 2 (system/method), Fig. 3+ (results, failure cases) tell the whole story with captions only? - Fig. 1 should show the actual robot in the actual task, not a block diagram. - Every plot needs units, and success-rate plots need trial counts in the caption ("n = 25 trials per condition"). - Prefer one dense, well-designed results figure over four thin ones; column width in the IEEE template punishes small multiples with unreadable fonts. - Frame-strip figures (time-lapse of one execution) buy more reviewer goodwill per square centimeter than any other robotics figure type. ## Quantify or delete Demo-speak is the house style of press releases, not ICRA papers. Rewrite every qualitative claim into a measurement or remove it: ```text "robust" -> success rate + condition range it held over "real-time" -> control/inference latency in ms + rate in Hz "generalizes" -> performance on N held-out objects/terrains, listed "significantly outperforms" -> absolute + relative delta, trials, dispersion "lightweight" -> parameters / FLOPs / on-board compute used "safe" -> constraint-violation count over all trials, or cut it ``` ## Notation across the stack ICRA papers routinely span kinematics, dynamics, estimation, and learning in six pages; notation collisions between these subcultures confuse reviewers fast. - Reserve q for configuration; do not reuse it as a Q-function five lines later — rename one of them and say so. - State frames explicitly on first use ({W}, {B}, {E}) and superscript transforms consistently; frame ambiguity in equations is a classic review complaint. - Define every symbol at first use even if "standard in your subfield"; the assigned reviewers may come from an adjacent RAS keyword. - SI units, comma-free equations, and bolded vectors per IEEE convention. ## Anonymity-safe prose (2026-cycle rule) Style intersects the double-anonymous policy in three recurring spots: - Platform descriptions: specs yes ("a 7-DOF torque-controlled arm"), possessives no ("our custom arm developed over five years"). - Prior-work continuity: "extending [7]" in third person, even when [7] is transparently the same group's paper. - Site references: "an industrial partner's facility" instead of the named factory; generalize any detail that uniquely identifies the lab. ## Limitations paragraph that helps you Since the classic pipeline offers no rebuttal (see `icra-review-process`), the limitations paragraph is the one place to pre-answer the objection every reviewer will otherwise raise unassisted. Name the strongest weakness precisely ("all objects were rigid; deformables defeat the contact model"), say why the contribution stands anyway, and point to the future-work line that addresses it. A reviewer who sees their objection already acknowledged writes "authors are aware" instead of "authors overclaim." ## Revision pass order 1. Task-first opening rewritten; headline numbers in the abstract. 2. Figure chain self-sufficient; captions carry trial counts and units. 3. Demo-speak sweep (table above) across every section. 4. Notation table built privately; collisions resolved. 5. Page budget enforced; derivations exported; body at 6.0 pages with references isolated on pages 7-8. 6. Limitations paragraph pre-answering the top predicted objection. ## Output format ```text [Opening] task-first? headline numbers present? [Figure chain] self-sufficient y/n — weakest figure: [Demo-speak] unquantified claims, worst three listed [Notation] collisions found: [Budget] content pages /6 — overflow plan: [Pre-answered objection] ```