The Seventh International Symposium of Robotics Research was held in Herrsching near Munich, Germany, from October 21 to 24, 1995, the first to be organized following the renewal undergone by the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR) during the preceding Symposium (Hidden Valley, October 1993). A board of eighteen officers was appointed: Suguru Arimoto (Tokyo University) Ruzena Bajcsy (University of Pennsylvania) Robert Bolles (SRI International) Mike Brady (Oxford University) Paolo Dario (Pisa University, Italy) Joris De Schutter (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) Olivier Faugeras (INRIA, France) Georges Giralt (LAAS-CNRS, Fra~ce), Secretary Gerd Hirzinger (DFVLR, Germany) Hirochika Inoue (Tokyo University), President-elect Ray Jarvis (Monash University, Australia) Takeo Kanade (Carnegie Mellon University) Hirofumi Miura (Tokyo University) Richard Paul (University of Pennsylvania), President Marc Raibert (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Bernie Roth (Stanford University) Yoshiaki Shirai (Osaka University) Tsuneo Yoshikawa (Kyoto University) It was our commitment to bring together active, leading robotics researchers from academia, government, and industry, with the ambitious objective to assess the state of Advanced Robotics and to discuss future research directions. Papers representing authoritative reviews of established research areas as well as papers reporting on new areas were sought for presentation. A number ofleading researchers were asked to submit extended abstracts outlining papers representing their areas of research. In addition to inviting participants, a call for papers was issued in order to include researchers who had made significant new contributions to robotics.