Impressive advances in computation, communication, smart materials, and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems bring closer to realization, the promise of furthering the cybernetic dream of building autonomous systems. These are systems that sense and manipulate their environment by gathering multi-modal sensor data, compressing and representing it in symbolic form at various levels of granularity, and using the representations to reason and learn about how to optimally interact with the environment. The problem is hard because real-world environments are complex, spatially extended, dynamic, stochastic, and largely unknown; autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must also accommodate massive sensory and motor (actuator) uncertainty and must act in real time.