The Autonomy Loop: Today’s Practices and Tomorrow’s Challenges

Autonomous systems are the quintessential representation of a feedback loop. Despite the area, in many ways, still strongly evolving, a lot of progress has been made over the last few decades and critical methods have been developed to design, analyze and implement autonomy.In this paper, we describe the key technical approaches currently used to develop and deploy autonomous systems, as well as describe new trends and research directions.The paper will use the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop as the prototypical functional model of an autonomous system, and use this to guide the description of the state of the art approaches in each of the functional blocks. We will also touch upon verification, validation and assurance aspects and describe implementation methods from a system engineering perspective.