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| ====== Introduction ====== | ====== Introduction ====== | ||
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| + | Electronics design trends have revolutionized society. The start was with centralized computing led by firms like IBM and DEC. These technologies enhanced productivity for global business operations, significantly impacting finance, HR, and administrative functions, eliminating the need for extensive paperwork. The next wave in economy shaping technologies consisted of edge computing devices (red in Figure below) such as personal computers, cell phones, and tablets. With this capability, companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others could add enormous productivity to the advertising and distribution functions for global business. Suddenly, one could directly reach any customer anywhere in the world. This mega-trend has fundamentally disrupted markets such as education (online), retail (ecommerce), | ||
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| + | Autonomy research traces its lineage to mid-20th-century cybernetics and control theory, where researchers like Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, and early robotics pioneers explored how machines could sense, process feedback, and act purposefully. The 1960s–1980s brought key breakthroughs: | ||
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| + | Modern autonomy began accelerating in the 1990s and 2000s with increased computing power, the rise of machine learning, and large-scale government programs. The DARPA Grand Challenges (2004–2007) marked a turning point, proving that self-driving vehicles could handle complex, unstructured environments and catalyzing both academic and commercial investment. The 2010s saw deep learning revolutionize perception, enabling robust object detection, scene understanding, | ||
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| + | Given the massive amount of research, several books have been written on autonomy. For example, Introduction to Autonomous Robots provides a comprehensive and accessible foundation for designing autonomous systems, covering the essential building blocks such as robot mechanisms, sensing modalities, actuation, perception, localization, | ||
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| + | In contrast to existing literature, this book focuses on the innovations required for a core design to be integrated into the governing systems in society. This process is especially challenging for autonomous systems because they integrate four broad domains which have traditionally not interacted with each other: | ||
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| + | - Legal and regulatory structures which implicitly have assumed human actors. | ||
| + | - Traditional mechanically focused safety protocols for cyber-physical systems. | ||
| + | - Traditional software product development flows. | ||
| + | - New artificial intelligence-based algorithms which replace the “driver” for autonomy. | ||
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| + | The remainder of this book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides a high-level introduction to autonomous systems, including the underlying technologies and their interaction with regulatory, safety, and standards environments. Chapter 3 examines hardware architectures, | ||
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