Preface

The 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007) was held in San Diego, CA, USA, from October 29 to November 2, 2007. This Special Issue of Advanced Robotics is a collection of expanded versions of papers selected from those which were presented at IROS 2007. For IROS 2007, there were 1393 papers submitted from 43 countries; this continues the overall upward trend of the number of paper submissions to IROS conferences. A careful and selective process was followed by the Program Committee to select high-quality papers. Based on the result of the review of the submitted papers, 682 papers were accepted for presentation at IROS 2007, and which were included in the Proceedings of IROS 2007. Consequently, the acceptance ratio was 49%, which also reflects the increasing selectivity of the IROS conference. From the high-quality papers presented at IROS 2007, 11 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, seven 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 IROS 2007, in particular Proffessors Eddie Grant, Gordon Lee and Ron Lumia, who formed the executive committee. 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.