Cyber-physical devices, from image sensors to microphones to appliance controllers to consumer drones, are revolutionizing cities, businesses and homes. The era of autonomous systems is at hand. It is time to update research agendas across computer science, especially in computer systems. Challenges facing autonomous systems cut across traditional domains and introduce new metrics of merit that traditional evaluations can't capture. This talk describes active research at ReRout Lab at The Ohio State University. Our research aims to democratize autonomous systems, creating programming paradigms that lead to robust app stores. Our research also improves processors, operating systems and distributed platforms underlying autonomous systems. In our vision, infrastructure must provide sustained speedup even without Moore's Law. We have designed and implemented autonomous systems in the cloud and using unmanned aerial vehicles. We have also made seminal contributions for problems related to infrastructure and sustained speedup. While our solutions employ queuing theory, online algorithms, benchmarking and other established techniques in computer systems, we have learned key abstractions to combine these techniques effectively.
