The 6th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2002) was held in June 2002 in Fukuoka, Japan, a decade after the first DARS symposium was convened. This book, containing the proceedings of the symposium, provides broad coverage of the technical issues in the current state of the art in distributed autonomous systems composed of multiple robots, robotic modules, or robotic agents. DARS 2002 dealt with new strategies for realizing complex, modular, robust, and fault-tolerant robotic systems, and this volume covers the technical areas of system design, modeling, simulation, operation, sensing, planning, and control. The papers that are included here were contributed by leading researchers from Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, and make up an invaluable resource for researchers and students in the field of distributed autonomous robotic systems.

1 Y. Tsujii, K. Ohno, S. Yamamoto, A. Goto, T. Fukuda: Structure and Properties of High-Density Polymer Brushes Prepared by Surface-Initiated Living Radical Polymerization.- 2 D.J. Dyer: Photoinitiated Synthesis of Grafted Polymers.- 3 T. Matsuda: Photoiniferter-Driven Precision Surface Graft Microarchitectures for Biomedical Applications.- 4 R. Advincula: Polymer Brushes by Anionic and Cationic Surface Initiated Polymerization.- 5 M.R. Buchmeiser: Metathesis Polymerization From and To Surfaces.-

In ten sections this book describes the principles and technology of Micro Mechanical Systems. Section one is a general introduction to the historical background and the parallels to microelectronics, reviewing the motivation for microsystems, and discussing microphysics and design and the evolution from microcomponents to microsystems. Section two covers the areas of photolithographic microfabrication, basic concepts of planar processing, materials, and processes. Section three looks at micromachining by machine tools, its history, basic principles and preparation methods. Section four discusses tribological aspects of microsystems. Section five covers fabrication, performance and examples of silicon microsensors. Section six looks at electric and magnetic micro-actuators for micro-robots. Section seven covers energy source and power supply methods. Section eight covers controlling principles and methods of micro mechanical systems and section nine gives examples of microsystems and micromachines. The final section discusses the future problems and outlook of micro mechanical systems.

Why are students not motivated? English levels, culture, class sizes, previous education get the blame in university classes. However, most students come into that first class wanting to learn, and in most cases the teacher causes demotivation. The key to sustaining or enhancing motivation lies within a classroom atmosphere built on respect and trust with a syllabus guiding students towards autonomy. Classes should avoid being only 'fun', and need to foster learners who can continue their learning. This monograph introduces and reports the outcomes of a guided-autonomy syllabus compared to the syllabus of textbook fragmentation. The guided-autonomy syllabus is a goal-oriented syllabus with the teacher acting as a facilitator in an authentic learning environment built on respect and trust gradually creating the autonomous learner. It increases internal motivation starting teacher-centered and gradually moving towards student-centeredness through autonomy enhancing activities, primers in second language acquisition, in an encouraging classroom atmosphere. A student, after a guided-autonomy class said, "it was a great atmosphere, meaningful, and not a waste of time."