Held from 3-5 September 1997 in Nantes, France, this was the fifth of the IFAC series of triennial Symposia on Robot Control. The final selection lead to 126 papers (from 200 submissions) in the Technical Program. This consisted of 33 sessions disposed in 3 parallel tracks and brought together contributions from 298 leading researchers. The papers covered a range of topics relevant to the field of robot control, including modelling and identification, force and compliance control, robot control techniques, vision control, grasp control, flexible robots, non holonomic robotic systems, walking robots, control design and architectures, teleoperation, and underwater robots. The Symposium featured three invited plenary speakers: Professor Steven Dubowsky, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a lecture entitled 'A perspective of the advancement of robotic systems during the past 15 years'; Professor Shanakr Sastry, from the University of California, presented a lecture entitled 'Air Traffic Management Systems: at the intersection of Control Theory and Robotics'; and Professor Friedrich Pfeiffer, from the Technical University of München, presented a lecture entitled 'Robots with unilateral constraints'.