A recent ICRA panel titled “Surviving the Paper Deluge” brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today.
The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to radical proposals for reshaping peer review as we know it.
Panel chair Aude Billard pointed to rapid growth across major IEEE Robotics and Automation Society venues, with a roughly exponential curve beginning around 2017. An estimate for 2025 suggests around 70,000 papers containing the word “robotics.”
Billard noted that while in some fields, extreme specialization may be an acceptable survival strategy, robotics is inherently different. A robot is an integration of perception, control, manipulation, learning, hardware, interaction, safety, and deployment. If researchers can only stay current within narrow silos, the field risks losing one of its core strengths: the ability to connect ideas across domains.
Kunpeng Yao presented a case study funded by IEEE RAS Science and Technology Watch Board. The team tried to do something that borders on heroic in today’s publishing environment; that is, reading an entire subfield carefully over a single year.
