The International Symposia on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) started at Riken, Japan in 1992. Along with three invited talks, they addressed the spreading research fields of DARS, which are classifiable along two streams: theoretical and standard studies of DARS, and interdisciplinary studies using DARS concepts.

This book of the Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2008) provides broad coverage of the technical issues of the current state of the art in distributed autonomous systems composed of multiple robots, robotic modules, or robotic agents. The DARS 2008 dealt with strategies to realize complex, modular, robust, and fault-tolerant robotic systems. Technologies and hardware experiments, as well as system design, modeling, simulation, sensing, planning, operation, communication, and control are presented here. Specific topics include multi-robot cooperation, swarm intelligence, modular robots, distributed sensing, mobiligence, ambient intelligence, and multi-agent systems interacting with human beings.