Icra Workflow

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)

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

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 (<year>.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

[Cycle] ICRA <year> — deadline <verified date> (verify at <year>.ieee-icra.org)
[Today minus deadline] <n> 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] <RA-L / IROS / CoRL> pre-selected: yes/no
[Next checkpoint] <date, ≤2 weeks out>