This book is the fifth official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the 5th Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences held in Seattle, Washington, USA, in August 2001.The book contains the following parts: introduction, champion teams, challenge award finalists, technical papers, poster presentations, and team descriptions (arranged according to various leagues).This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source of references and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.

Robot learning is a broad and interdisciplinary area. This holds with regard to the basic interests and the scienti c background of the researchers involved, as well as with regard to the techniques and approaches used. The interests that motivate the researchers in this eld range from fundamental research issues, such as how to constructively understand intelligence, to purely application o- ented work, such as the exploitation of learning techniques for industrial robotics. Given this broad scope of interests, it is not surprising that, although AI and robotics are usually the core of the robot learning eld, disciplines like cog- tive science, mathematics, social sciences, neuroscience, biology, and electrical engineering have also begun to play a role in it. In this way, its interdisciplinary character is more than a mere fashion, and leads to a productive exchange of ideas. One of the aims of EWLR-6 was to foster this exchange of ideas and to f- ther boost contacts between the di erent scienti c areas involved in learning robots. EWLR is, traditionally, a \European Workshop on Learning Robots." Nevertheless, the organizers of EWLR-6 decided to open up the workshop to non-European research as well, and included in the program committee we- known non-European researchers. This strategy proved to be successful since there was a strong participation in the workshop from researchers outside - rope, especially from Japan, which provided new ideas and lead to new contacts.

Guava (Psidium guajava L.) is an exquisite, nutritionally and economically valuable crop of tropical and subtropical regions of the world. It outshines other tropical fruits in productivity, hardiness, adaptability, nutritional value, and ensures higher economic returns to growers. Guava is commercially grown in over 70 countries, and is gaining in popularity as a 'super fruit' due to its nutritional and health benefits. Notable recent developments include the potential to improve crop yields and quality. New research has also contributed to better understanding of the crop environment, plant growth and physiology of tree and fruit development, with implications for both breeding and cultivation. Guava is one of the few tree fruits where round-the-year harvest is possible by crop regulation. Interspecific hybridization with wild Psidium species has yielded hybrids which are resistant to wilt (a major guava disease in many countries) and are graft compatible. This book: * is the only publication available in English covering sustainable guava cultivation; * presents the current state of knowledge on the origin, history, physiology, culture and trade of guava throughout the world; and * addresses the major production and post-harvest problems. With contributions from international experts, this is a valuable resource for researchers and students in horticulture, and guava-industry support personnel.

Robots are being used in increasingly complicated and demanding tasks, often in environments that are complex or even hostile. Underwater, space and volcano exploration are just some of the activities that robots are taking part in, mainly because the environments that are being explored are dangerous for humans. Robots can also inhabit dynamic environments, for example to operate among humans, not just in factories, but also taking on more active roles. Recently, for instance, they have made their way into the home entertainment market. Given the variety of situations that robots will be placed in, learning becomes increasingly important.

Robot learning is essentially about equipping robots with the capacity to improve their behaviour over time, based on their incoming experiences. The papers in this volume present a variety of techniques. Each paper provides a mini-introduction to a subfield of robot learning. Some also give a fine introduction to the field of robot learning as a whole. There is one unifying aspect to the work reported in the book, namely its interdisciplinary nature, especially in the combination of robotics, computer science and biology. This approach has two important benefits: first, the study of learning in biological systems can provide robot learning scientists and engineers with valuable insights into learning mechanisms of proven functionality and versatility; second, computational models of learning in biological systems, and their implementation in simulated agents and robots, can provide researchers of biological systems with a powerful platform for the development and testing of learning theories.