This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots, SIMPAR 2008, held in Venice, Italy, in November 2008. The 29 revised full papers and 21 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers address all current issues of robotics applications and simulation environments thereof, such as 3D robot simulation, reliability, scalability and validation of robot simulation, simulated sensors and actuators, offline simulation of robot design, online simulation with real­time constraints, simulation with software/hardware-in-the-loop, middleware for robotics, modeling framework for robots and environments, testing and validation of robot control software, standardization for robotic services, communication infrastructures in distributed robotics, interaction between sensor networks and robots, human robot interaction, and multi­robot. The papers are organized in topical sections on simulation, programming, and applications.