Welcome to this special issue of Autonomous Robots (AURO) that features articles extended from conference papers of the 2020 Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference, which was held virtually in July 2020. The articles were carefully selected for invitation to this special issue out of the conference papers that had already gone through a highly competitive selection process. We hope that the readers will appreciate the additional material included and the quality improvements resulting from the journal review and article revision process.There are sixteen articles in this special issue, which can be broadly categorized into the following groups: