Preface

The 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011) was held in San Francisco, CA, USA, from 25 to 30 September 2011. This Special Issue of Advanced Robotics is a collection of expanded versions of papers selected from those which were presented at IROS 2011. IROS 2011 received 2459 papers (a record!). The IROS Conference Editorial Board carefully obtained reviews for all papers. The conference senior program committee met in person in June 2011 and, based on these reviews, accepted 790 papers for presentation at the conference. These were included in the Proceedings of IROS 2011. Consequently, the acceptance ratio was 32%, which reflects the increasing selectivity of the IROS conference. From the high-quality papers presented at IROS 2011, 18 of the best papers were selected based on the review results to be considered for inclusion in this Special Issue. The authors of these papers were asked to revise their papers and these papers were evaluated again by reviewers selected by the Editorial Board of Advanced Robotics. Finally, six of these papers were selected for publication in this Special Issue of Advanced Robotics. First, we would like to thank all those who contributed to the success of the IROS 2011 technical program, in particular Professors Nancy Amato, Vijay Kumar, Oliver Brock, Henrik Christensen, Peter Corke and Daniela Rus, and the general chair Professor Oussama Khatib. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to all the reviewers who helped with the review of these papers for this Special Issue, as well as to the authors for undertaking the revision and expansion of their conference papers.