Towards a theoretical framework of autonomous systems underpinned by intelligence and systems sciences

TLDR

Autonomous systems are an emerging AI technology that operates without human intervention, built on advances in intelligence, cognition, computer, and systems sciences, and include brain‑inspired, cognitive robotic, and autonomous knowledge‑learning paradigms that promise to augment human capabilities. The paper investigates the intelligent and mathematical foundations of autonomous systems, focusing on the structural and behavioral properties that underpin their intelligence and how it aggregates from reflexive to autonomous and cognitive levels. The authors introduce a hierarchical intelligence model (HIM) that formalizes the inductive evolution of human and system intelligence and analyze system autonomy properties for applications in computational intelligence and systems engineering.

Abstract

Autonomous systems are an emerging AI technology functioning without human intervention underpinned by the latest advances in intelligence, cognition, computer, and systems sciences. This paper explores the intelligent and mathematical foundations of autonomous systems. It focuses on structural and behavioral properties that constitute the intelligent power of autonomous systems. It explains how system intelligence aggregates from reflexive, imperative, adaptive intelligence to autonomous and cognitive intelligence. A hierarchical intelligence model ( HIM ) is introduced to elaborate the evolution of human and system intelligence as an inductive process. The properties of system autonomy are formally analyzed towards a wide range of applications in computational intelligence and systems engineering. Emerging paradigms of autonomous systems including brain-inspired systems, cognitive robots, and autonomous knowledge learning systems are described. Advances in autonomous systems will pave a way towards highly intelligent machines for augmenting human capabilities.