Principles of Autonomy

In order to realise true autonomy, a system will require to abide by the following principles:

1. Existence of state - the system must exist in distinct states with clear state transitions
2. Awareness of state - the system should know the current state; a system should be capable of self-observation
3. Decoupling between state awareness and state events - state awareness is independent of events that occur within the state
4. State control - autonomy is the result of the state awareness to be automatically guided by the system based on state events