Autonomous systems are an important part of todays and future solutions for the automotive and industrial sector. The research and development activities to enable high/full automated driving and industry 4.0 have to deal with a lot of new requirements (e.g. fail operational, cyber security), technologies (connectivity over 5G, neuronal networks, future computing platforms) and topics (data analytics, artificial intelligence). Furthermore processes, methods und tools lack behind and need to speed up to cope with all the consequences in validation and verification. The short paper will give an overview over these challenges and the actual state of research and the development in the field of digital autonomous systems.