Autonomy 2.0: The Quest for Economies of Scale

The past decade has witnessed remarkable advancements in robotics and AI technologies, ushering in the era of autonomous machines. In this new age, service robots, autonomous drones, delivery robots, self-driving vehicles and other autonomous machines are poised to replace humans in providing various services.5 While the rise of autonomous machines promises to revolutionize our economy, the reality has fallen short of expectations despite over a decade of intensive R&D investments. The current development paradigm, dubbed Autonomy 1.0, scales mainly with the size of engineering team rather than with the amount of relevant data or computational resources. This limitation prevents the autonomy industry from fully leveraging economies of scale, particularly the exponentially decreasing cost of computing power and the explosion of available data.