If you read these instructions, you probably have been invited by a member of the Editorial Board to review a paper for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFT ROBOTICS (T-SRO). Thank you very much for accepting to be a part of this new, important and exciting endeavour of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society by reviewing – or by indicating who could be a good reviewer, in case you have to postpone your important service to the community and decline.

T-SRO uses a double-anonymous reviewing process where the reviewers are never known to the authors and the authors are not known to the reviewers.

Please respect the deadline. As an author, you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of minimizing delays. Please provide detailed comments to the authors so as to support your recommendation. An appropriate review format could include: (1) a brief summary of the paper, to convey your understanding of the paper to the authors; (2) overall comments that summarize your opinion (but do not include your publication recommendation in the review text); and (3) a (possibly bulleted) list of more minor details, such as grammar or notation corrections, suggestions to improve figures, etc.

The following points are suggested for your comments:

• What is the contribution of the paper?
• Does the author explain the significance of this paper?
• Is the paper clearly written and well organized?
• Does the introduction state the purpose of the paper?
• Are the references relevant and complete? Supply missing references.
• If the paper is not technically sound, why not?
• If the paper is too long, how can it be shortened?
• Should some content be moved to the supplementary materials?
• Is additional information needed to make the work repeatable?

Please supply any information that you think will be useful to the author for a revision, for enhancing the appeal of the paper, or for convincing him/her of the weak points or mistakes.

Do not identify yourself or your organization within the review text. The reviewer’s recommendation for acceptance or rejection should not be included in the comments to the author.

In your critical comments to the author, please be specific. If you find that the results are already known, please give references to earlier papers that contain these or similar results. If you say that the reasoning is incorrect or vague, please indicate specifically where and why. If you suggest that the paper be rewritten, give specific suggestions as to which parts of the paper should be deleted, amplified or modified, and please indicate how. If the paper has a multimedia attachment (typically, a video clip), please comment on this too. Is it consistent with the paper’s content? Does it enhance the contribution of the work? If it is a video, how is the technical quality?

If you feel that additional material (equations, graphs, tables, etc.) needs to be included in your review, you can attach a PDF file to your review. Please, mention in your comments to the author that you have prepared a pdf file with such material. The software we use to remove any author-identifying metadata from your PDF file may also remove annotations you make to the PDF submission (e.g., using Adobe Acrobat comment bubbles), so please do not provide comments by electronically annotating the submission.