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 limited directions and some objects are occluded by others. In 1980, the author wrote a book "Computer Vision" in Japanese to introduce an interesting new approach to visual information processing developed so far. Since then computer vision has made remarkable progress: various rangefinders have become available, new methods have been developed to obtain 3D informa tion, knowledge representation frameworks have been proposed, geometric models which were developed in CAD/CAM have been used for computer vision, and so on. The progress in computer vision technology has made it possible to understand more complex 3 D scenes. There is an increasing demand for 3D computer vision. In factories, for example, automatic assembly and inspection can be realized with fewer con straints than conventional ones which employ two-dimensional computer vision."

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 a process of nomination and voting. The Program Committee consisted of the seventeen officers of the IFRR: (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Ruzena Bajcy (Oxford University, UK) Andrew Blake (SRI International, USA) Robert Bolles (Scuola Superiore Sant' Anna, Pis a, Italy) Paolo Dario (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium) Joris De Schutter (LAAS-CNRS, France), Secretary Georges Giralt (DLR, Germany) Gerd Hirzinger (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) Shigeo Hirose (University of Tokyo, Japan), President Hirochika Inoue (Monash University, Australia) Ray Jarvis (CMU, USA), Treasurer Takeo Kanade (University of Michigan, USA) Dan Koditschek (University of Tokyo, Japan) Hirofumi Miura (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Richard Paul (Stanford University, USA) Bernie Roth Y oshiaki Shirai (Osaka University, Japan) Tsuneo Yoshikawa (Kyoto University, Japan) While a limited number of participants were nominated in each area by the Program Committee members of the area, a call for papers was issued in order to include researchers who had made