Autonomous devices, such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial and marine vehicles, and smart factory robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. When these  objects are connected, they form (large-scale) networked autonomous systems that need to coordinate their actions and function interactively with human users in  a seamless way.

Autonomous systems is a rapidly developing field that contributes to further digitalization of the society by facilitating new services, increasing productivity,  improving safety, and using resources more efficiently.

Building on recent ICT and machine intelligence advances, we focus on large-scale, geographically-distributed

autonomous systems, that can coordinate their actions to accomplish complex tasks in uncertain and unstructured environments and with limited or no human intervention. We seek to develop reliable communication and computing platforms that can collect data from various sensors and interact with actuator units in real-time, and distributed control and computing methods that generate the machine intelligence that allows the system to adapt to the environment and perform its task autonomously. Such holistic systems research integrating various technology components is key for moving this area forward.

ACAS has three main focus areas: 1) Perception and Sensing, 2) Autonomy and 3) Communication and Computation.