Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS)

RAS can be viewed as the application of software, artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks as directed by humans. Simply “autonomy is the ability of a machine to perform a task without human input. Thus an autonomous system is a machine, whether hardware or software, once activated performs some task or function on its own”. The term autonomy can be a barrier to understanding as it is, generally, specific to a system or sub-system. Therefore, it can be misleading to refer to an autonomous platform if the entire system of systems is not autonomous. It can be helpful to consider the level of human input, how much discretion the machine has with regard to the task and what aspect of the system has been automated.