Similar to previous editions, the SIRS96 was marked by an intense scientific programme and vivid discussions amongst the participants. Very often these discussions continued outside the conference room and took over the center of Lisbon by night!
The SIRS96 has covered a wide number of research topics in the area of Robotics and Intelligent Systems: computer vision and recognition, active vision, architectures, learning and control, mobile robots, planning, etc., to name just a few. On the last day of the symposium, the participant,,; were asked to nominate a set of papers for a special issue of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. The results are the nine papers presented in this special issue, which give an overview of the main topics covered during the SIRS96. The first set of papers is devoted to aspects of the organization of an autonomous robotic system in terms both of a general architecture, examples of behavior and systems integration, and internal representations.
One of the main topics addressed by various authors has to do with the development of an appropriate architecture to integrate various levels of mapping between sensing and acting in an unknown environ-