Book excerpt: This book is a collection of papers on the state of the art in experimental robotics. Experimental Robotics is at the core of validating robotics research for both its systems science and theoretical foundations. Because robotics experiments are carried out on physical, complex machines, of which its controllers are subject to uncertainty, devising meaningful experiments and collecting statistically significant results, pose important and unique challenges in robotics. Robotics experiments serve as a unifying theme for robotics system science and algorithmic foundations. These observations have led to the creation of the International Symposia on Experimental Robotics. The papers in this book were presented at the 2002 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics.