In this paper the following selection problem is discussed. A set of $n$ items is given and we wish to choose a subset of exactly $p$ items of the minimum total cost. This problem is a special case of 0-1 knapsack in which all the item weights are equal to~1. Its deterministic version has a trivial $O(n)$-time algorithm, which consists in choosing $p$ items of the smallest costs. In this paper it is assumed that the item costs are uncertain. Two robust models, namely two-stage and recoverable ones, under discrete and interval uncertainty representations, are discussed. Several positive and negative complexity results for both of them are provided.