Systems Challenges for Trustworthy Embodied Systems
It addresses the problem of transitioning from embedded to embodied systems for developers and engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems engineering concepts.
The paper identifies key engineering challenges in developing trustworthy autonomous embodied systems, focusing on ensuring safe, reliable, and human-compatible behavior in unpredictable real-world environments.
A new generation of increasingly autonomous and self-learning embodied systems is about to be developed. When deploying embodied systems into a real-life context we face various engineering challenges, as it is crucial to coordinate the behavior of embodied systems in a beneficial manner, ensure their compatibility with our human-centered social values, and design verifiably safe and reliable human-machine interaction. We are arguing that traditional systems engineering is coming to a climacteric from embedded to embodied systems, and with assuring the trustworthiness of dynamic federations of situationally aware, intent-driven, explorative, ever-evolving, largely non-predictable, and increasingly autonomous embodied systems in uncertain, complex, and unpredictable real-world contexts. We are therefore identifying a number of urgent systems challenges for trustworthy embodied systems, including robust and human-centric AI, cognitive architectures, uncertainty quantification, trustworthy self-integration, and continual analysis and assurance.