Instructions for Conference Attendees


Thank you for joining the first virtual RSS!


  • The virtual conference will be held on https://pheedloop.com/rss2020/virtual/.
  • When attending the conference, please respect the RSS 2020 Code of Conduct.
  • Help & Technical support is provided at the Help Desk Meetup on the virtual platform.
  • Best experience with zoom sessions: Try to log into some zoom account in a separate brower tab. This will generate some cookies that might avoid you having to enter credentials and CAPTCHAs every time you switch between sessions.

The Paper Discussion Sessions

The dissemination and discussion of the newest state-of-the-art research in robotics is the most important role of RSS. We therefore let live discussion sessions of all accepted papers take the central part of the RSS virtual program.

The goal of these discussion sessions is to enable a free and open discussion round and exchange - in analogy to poster sessions at previous RSS conferences. Rather than only passively consuming videos/talks, you should actively engange and ask questions.

During the 2 hour sessions you might want to alternate between

  • Browsing the accepted papers, watching their pre-recorded presentations
  • Joining the live discussion sessions and directly ask the authors questions.

Technical Help

Prefer a Chrome/Chromuim browser

The embedded zoom windows can properly be made full screen and all functionalities be used with Chrome. Other browsers raised problems.

The social meetups at spatial chat will only work with Chrome.

Avoiding CAPTCHAs

Whenever you switch sessions, the embedded zoom windows might let you enter CHATCHAs.

In our experience this can be avoided by signing into ANY zoom account with the same browser (in another tab). Perhaps the reason is that this generates a cookie which makes zoom generally believe that you’re not a bot.

Further note that some privacy/anti-tracking browser extensions might make it impossible to avoid the CAPTCHAs, possibly as they block cross-site cookies.

We generally realized that cookies cause quite a diverse behavior for different users – so if in doubt, try to clear all cookies, log into some zoom account, then log into our virtual conference site.

Don’t open Q&A/chat in tiny zoom windows

A curiosity: When you open Q&A or chats in a very small screen zoom window, it takes so much space that you cannot see anything anymore and cannot close it anymore - you’re stuck. (You can re-click the session, of course.)

Zoom polls don’t work in the web client

Polls within Zoom unfortunately don’t work in the Zoom web client (i.e., the Zoom sessions embedded in Pheedloop). If a workshop uses that feature, please use the direct Zoom link and the Zoom desktop client or mobile app.

Complimentary Offer from Now Publishers

This is a verbatim offer from Now Publishers:

Dear Robotics: Science and Systems attendees,

Now Publishers is pleased to support Robotics: Science and Systems 2020 in its efforts to produce a successful virtual conference. We have arranged with the organizers to make relevant content freely available to participants for the duration of the conference, this can be done from the following webpage:

https://www.nowpublishers.com/Conference/Robotics2020

To download content, attendees will need a Now Publishers account and the following access code: RSS-9507. Once logged in, you will have unlimited access to relevant content. This access is available from July 12 - 16. The access code will be valid for the full period, but you will need to enter it every time you login.

The journal PDF versions will be available for the duration of the conference. Once logged in, navigate to the content of interest and you will be able to download the PDF version of issues.

If attendees would like to contribute to one of our journals, please send an e-mail to mark.dejongh@nowpublishers.com.

Best wishes
Mark de Jongh
Now Publishers