Autonomous material systems

Abstract

This article describes the challenges of defining and classifying autonomous material systems. We believe that there is no consistent definition of “autonomy” across different scientific disciplines, and this difference makes it difficult to assess progress as a whole. The authors pose that there is a paradox between achieving greater autonomy and, presently, maintaining an achievable cost of material system complexity. Examples are given from the artificial and biological world and make the, somewhat safe, claim that organisms make a better tradeoff between the manufacturing complexity required to build autonomy. The authors draw from the Autonomous Driving System scale to classify autonomy levels in material systems, and give specific examples of increasing architectural complexity. We then call out specific research trajectories to pursue in order to make better tradeoffs in this engineering contradiction, manufacturing being a specific example. This article will hopefully bring some uniformity between different materials science disciplines. Graphical abstract