Advances in Autonomous Systems: A Summary of the AutoDefence Summer School at IEEE ICAS’21

This paper presents a panel summary on the framework of Autonomous Systems (AS) and paradigms in development. AS are advanced intelligent systems and general AI technologies triggered by the transdisciplinary development in intelligence science, system science, brain science, cognitive science, robotics, computational intelligence, and intelligent mathematics. It is recognized that, in a rigorous perspective, the only matured AS is human brains and human collective intelligence. It explains why there was rarely man-made AS in the past half century, because of the theoretical, mathematical, computational, and programming language unreadiness. Therefore, the ultimate goal of AS is to implement a brain-inspired system that may think and behave as a human counterpart in hybrid intelligent systems and general AI implementations. There is no doubt that AS will be increasingly demanded by the intelligence-based industries and societies for cognitive computers, deep machine learning systems, robotics, brain-inspired systems, mission-critical systems, self-driving vehicles, and intelligent appliances.