Preface

The 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) was held in Las Vegas, Oct. 27–31, 2003. The main theme of IROS 2003 was ‘Intelligent Robots and Systems for Human Security, Health, and Prosperity’. IROS conferences have been growing rapidly for the past few years. For IROS 2003, 1042 papers were received from 42 countries. All the papers went through thorough reviews by the Program Committee: 623 papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings, giving an acceptance ratio of 59.8%. The selected papers were presented in 105 technical sessions and they were all included in the CD-ROM of the Proceedings. Due to the high-quality of selected papers, we felt that some of the papers merited publication in a Special Issue on Selected Papers from IROS 2003 in Advanced Robotics. We selected 32 top-ranked papers to be considered for the Special Issue. The authors of these papers were asked to revise their papers, and these revised papers were evaluated again by reviewers selected by the Editorial Board of Advanced Robotics. Finally, four papers have been selected for publication in this Special Issue of Advanced Robotics. Furthermore, a paper on a humanoid robot system demonstrated at IROS 2003 has also been included in this volume. We would like to thank all the reviewers who devoted their unselfish time in reviewing the papers. We would also like to thank the Editorial Board of Advanced Robotics for speedy processing and publishing the Special Issue. Finally, we are indebted to the authors who responded quickly to our request to revise their papers for publication.