A leading peer-reviewed journal in its field for more than two decades, The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) was the first scholarly publication on robotics research.

IJRR offers incisive and thought-provoking original research papers and articles, perceptive reviews, and lively editorials on ground-breaking trends issues, technical developments, and theories in robotics by the outstanding scholars and practitioners in the field. The Journal covers more than just narrow technical advances-it embraces a wide variety of topics. IJRR only publishes work of archival value, which is produced to advance science and technology in this field, and stays valuable in time. To do so the work must be original, solid, and useful for others to build upon.

Consistently ranked in the top 3 in its category of the Thomson Scientific JCR, IJRR publishes scholarly articles that provides engineers, researchers, and scientists with the very best of current research on robotics research - from applied mathematics to artificial intelligence to computer science, to psychological, cognitive and behavioural sciences, to electrical and mechanical engineering.

IJRR exclusively operates on the basis of peer reviews, with no professional editor external to the research community judging on scientific matters. All submitted manuscripts are reviewed by at least two expert reviewers of appropriate standing in the field of robotics research, in a single-blind scheme (reviewer names are concealed from the submitting authors).

There is no page limit for IJRR submissions. The rule is however that a paper should be as long as necessary, and no longer: conciseness is highly valued.

IJRR also publishes high quality, peer reviewed datasets, accompanied by adequate text material to illustrate them and their usage in the form of a regular manuscript.

Multimedia (mostly video or data) extensions are most welcome parts of an IJRR paper, as they concur to illustrate and demonstrate its results.

This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

All issues of IJRR are available to browse online.

It is the policy of The International Journal of Robotics Research to encourage the application of theoretical advances to real problems and data in Robotics, intended here in its broadest meaning, as per Sir M. Brady’s definition: “the intelligent link between perception and action”. Results should represent a significant rather than incremental advance, and should be verified appropriately according to the topic. Experimental results are strongly encouraged. There should be an up to date literature review, and meaningful comparisons with previous work to demonstrate any proposed advance. Advancements must be rigorously demonstrated by all relevant and applicable scientific means - be it mathematical proofs, statistically significant and reproducible experimental tests, field demonstrations, or whatever may be needed to convince a duly skeptical, critical scientist.

The five fundamental questions implicitly asked to IJRR authors are: "Why is this problem important?", "Why wasn't it solved before?", "What's the key idea in the solution?", "How do you show that it really works?", and "How can others use your results?"