The Eighth International Symposium of Robotics Research was held in Shonan near Kamakura, Japan from October 4 to 7, 1997, organized by the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR). The goal of the Symposium was to bring together active, leading robotics researchers from academia and industry to assess the state of art of Advanced Robotics and to discuss future research directions. The Symposium was held in an informal setting with fifty nine participants. Attendance was limited in order to maximize interaction. The selection of participants was made by the Program Committee using...

The purpose of computer vision is to make computers capable of understanding environments from visual information. Computer vision has been an interesting theme in the field of artificial intelligence. It involves a variety of intelligent information processing: both pattern processing for extraction of meaningful symbols from visual information and symbol processing for determining what the symbols represent. The term "3D computer vision" is used if visual information has to be interpreted as three-dimensional scenes. 3D computer vision is more challenging because objects are seen from...