Due to rapid development of key technology sectors like electronics, telecommunications, etc., the systems that are currently being developed and introduced to users are becoming more complex and more distributed. This allows decentralizing the control and providing more flexibility, in this case, for autonomous robotic systems. Although adaptivity and resilience of distributed systems are among the most welcome features and there has been several successful missions carried out by autonomous sensor platforms, the community still lacks good practical examples. We see that the most important issues is absence of unifying design paradigm of distributed systems. Therefore we propose distributed systems design methods concept – ViaBots. The concept of ViaBots merges robotics and systems theory creating a new potentially powerful idea for design of viable autonomous sensor platforms. The core of the idea is Viable Systems Model (VSM), proposed by Stafford Beer. VSM describes functions and subsystems that a system needs to be viable as well as required relations among these functions.