Call for Papers
The 2017 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference will bring together researchers working on algorithmic and mathematical foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotic systems. We seek your best work in all areas of robotics and solicit papers that cover both the “Science” and the “Systems” of robotics.

The conference will be single-track, and the final program will be the result of a thorough review process to give attendees an opportunity to see the best research in all areas of robotics. Submissions will be evaluated in terms of their technical quality, novelty, significance, potential impact, and clarity.

The program will include invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. The three-day main session will be followed by two days of workshops and tutorials. Workshop-only registration will also be available. Every effort is being made to keep conference expenses affordable, particularly for student attendees.

This year, we are especially excited to showcase the following two themes via special sessions at the conference:
Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control: Dexterous Manipulation, Locomotion, Nonlinear Control, Visual Servoing
Mechanisms: Design, Humanoids, Hands, Legged Robots, Flying Robots, Underwater Robots, Novel Actuators, Reconfigurable Robots, MEMS/NEMS, Micro/Nanobots

Important Dates
Full Paper Submission: Monday January 30, 2017, Anywhere on Earth
Paper Notification: April 30, 2017
Conference Dates: July 12-16, 2017 (Main Conference: July 12-14, Workshops: July 15-16)
Submissions will either be accepted or rejected. This year, RSS will not have a rebuttal phase, nor conditional acceptances.

Themes
RSS is actively seeking papers in areas that have not been traditionally represented at the conference and will stay true to its name covering both the “Science” and the “Systems” of robotics. Papers containing original and unpublished work are solicited in all areas of robotics, including (but not limited to) the following themes:
Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control: Dexterous Manipulation, Locomotion, Nonlinear Control, Visual Servoing
Mechanisms: Design, Humanoids, Hands, Legged Systems, Snakes, Novel Actuators, Reconfigurable Robots, MEMS/NEMS, Micro/Nanobots, Novel Sensors, Haptics, Tactile Interfaces
Planning and Algorithms: Motion Planning, Task Planning, Coordination, Complexity and Completeness, Computational Geometry, Simulation, Planning under uncertainty
Manipulation: Contact Modeling, Grasp Synthesis, Assembly, Force Control, Manipulation Planning
Human-Robot Interaction and Human Centered Systems: Brain-Machine Interfaces, Telerobotics, Human Augmentation, Assistive Robots, Social Robots, Safe Interaction, Robots and Art, Grounded language acquisition, Natural language generation, Human-robot dialogue
Field Robotics: Underwater Robotics, Aerial/Space Robotics, Agricultural and Mining Robotics
Formal methods: Safety, Verification, Validation, Correct-by-construction Systems, Controller Synthesis, Certification
Distributed Systems: Multi-Robot Systems, Networked Robots, Robot Soccer
Medical Robotics: Robot-Assisted Procedures, Smart Surgical Tools, Rehabilitation Robotics, Interventional Therapy, Image-Guided Procedures, Surgical Simulation, Soft-Tissue Modeling, Telesurgery
Biological Robotics: Biomimetic Robotics, Robotic Investigation of Biological Science and Systems, Neurobotics, Prosthetics, Robotics and Molecular Biology
Robot Perception: Vision, Tactile and Force Perception, Range Sensing, Inertial and propreoceptive sensing, Sensor Fusion, Calibration & Identification
Mobile Systems and Mobility: Mapping, Localization, Navigation, SLAM, Collision Avoidance, Exploration
Estimation and Learning for Robotic Systems: Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Techniques, Deep Learning, Graphical Models, Imitation Learning, Programming by Demonstration, Diagnostics

Author Information
The RSS submission site will be made available in December 2016. We will notify this mailing list as soon as that happens.
Submissions may be up to 8 pages in length, excluding references. Reviewing for RSS 2016 is double-blind, so authors should not be listed on the title page, and reasonable anonymity should be maintained in the paper.

Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences are not appropriate for RSS and violate our dual submission policy. One major exception to this rule are technical reports (e.g. in arXiv).

Submissions will be evaluated in terms of their technical quality, novelty, significance, potential impact, and clarity. All papers accepted for presentation at the main conference will be published in online proceedings and available free of cost.

Special Journal Issues
About half of the selected papers will be invited for submission to a special issue of International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) and a special issue of Autonomous Robots (AuRo). For example, out !
of the 57
accepted papers in RSS 2014, 15 appeared in the IJRR Special Issue, and 13 in the AuRo Special Issue.