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Emergent Autonomy – A Step Toward Assurance

There is widespread embrace in the aviation community for a future where humans will have a different relationship with the aircraft that they fly – pilots may supervise multiple aircraft simultaneously without having direct command and control of individual aircraft. These "pilotless" aircraft are often referred to as autonomous. In this paper, we apply the thinking from systems theory of emergent behaviors to autonomous vehicles. We will discuss how an integrated collection of automated functions that behave in a deterministic fashion (i.e., pre-defined inputs produce pre-defined outputs) at a component level exhibit emergent autonomy when observed at a system-of-systems level. We have coined the term "emergent autonomy" to describe this phenomenon. To illustrate our hypothesis, we will use a real-world implementation of Zipline’s unmanned aircraft-based cargo delivery service currently operating at nation-wide scale in Rwanda and Ghana. Constructing a complex system of individual deterministic behaviors can exhibit emergent autonomy and provide superior performance and safety at the systems-of-systems level.