This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Evolutionary Robotics, ER 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2001. The seven revised full papers by the invited speakers Rodney A. Brooks, Dario Floreano, Robert J. Full, Inman Harvey, Owen Holland, Francesco Mondada, and Jordan B. Pollack were carefully selected and revised for presentation in the book. Among the topics addressed are imitation of life and machine consciousness, autonomous vision-based robots, evolved robots, living machines, artificial evolution, bioinspired artificial life locomotion, and mobile robotic systems engineering.