PHOENIX: Fine-Tuned SLM-Powered Autonomous Satellite Lifetime Extension via Predictive Self-Healing and Multi-Agent AI Recovery

As the scale and complexity of cloud-based AI systems continue to escalate, ensuring service reliability through rapid fault detection and adaptive recovery has become a critical challenge. While existing approaches integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic understanding and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for policy optimization, they often rely on sequential, loosely coupled architectures that underutilize the generative and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift with PASE, a Planning-Aware Semantic self-healing engine, a novel fault self-healing framework that reconceptualizes recovery as a neuro-symbolic program synthesis task. PASE employs an LLM as a core Plan Synthesis Engine to generate structured recovery plans from a library of semantic primitives. A Neural-Symbolic World Model verifies plan feasibility through simulation, while a Meta-Prompt Optimizer, trained via DRL, learns to generate optimal prompts that guide the LLM's planning process. This tight reason-plan-verify-adapt loop enables dynamic, context-aware recovery strategy generation beyond predefined action spaces. Experiments on a real-world cloud fault injection dataset demonstrate that PASE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, reducing average system recovery time by over 40% and improving fault detection accuracy in unknown fault scenarios. Our framework advances autonomous system management by unifying LLM-based reasoning with model-assisted verification and meta-learned guidance.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating beyond reliable communications must recover from failures without human intervention. We investigate an architecture in which conventional deterministic layered control autonomy manages normal operations, while an invokable large language model (LLM) serves as a diagnostic and recovery planner when onboard anomaly detection identifies performance outside expected limits. Because language models are stochastic, rigorous evaluation requires ensemble testing rather than individual demonstrations. We present a closed-loop simulation architecture that couples real-time C vehicle software with a higher-level orchestration layer for physics-based fault injection, structured prompting, language-model interaction, mission file generation, validation, execution, and LLM-judge scoring. The framework, which we call SPAR (Simulation Platform for AUV Recovery), supports evaluation across fault realizations, prompt structures, reasoning models, and mission conditions. We vary these for a mass-shift fault over 480 SPAR trials, evaluating a frontier model and three off-the-shelf locally deployable LLMs. Model choice dominates diagnosis: the frontier model places the CG-shift mechanism in its top three hypotheses in 85-90% of trials, versus 60-78% for the best local model. Reasoning analysis indicates that local-model success is associated with following the complete diagnostic procedure, whereas weaker models often commit prematurely to elevator failure even though the actuator tracks its command. Diagnosis and operational decision performance do not appear to be coupled in this dataset. The contributions are an architecture extending unanticipated-fault recovery from detection to mitigation and an ensemble methodology for evaluating LLM-assisted mission management on low-power AUVs.

The space industry is quietly building toward something nobody has fully reckoned with: orbital data centers running thousands of autonomous AI workloads with no human in the loop, 550 km above the Earth. Microsoft, AWS, and a growing list of orbital computing ventures are moving cloud-scale processing off the ground and into orbit. What none of them have answered yet is the governance question -- when autonomous AI systems at orbital data center scale make wrong decisions in space, what stops those decisions before they become irreversible? We introduce Glass Box: a runtime constitutional AI verification layer that intercepts every candidate action from an onboard AI policy and evaluates it against six physics-grounded constitutional constraints and seven Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) safety invariants before a single command reaches any spacecraft subsystem. Every approved action carries a weighted explainability score E(a_t) in [0,1] and a complete constitutional audit log. We demonstrate Glass Box within Project October: a fully simulated five-layer autonomous orbital intelligence architecture for CubeSat-class spacecraft. We prove that Glass Box verification overhead is O(N_c) in the number of constitutional rules, independent of model size or spacecraft state dimension. We present a complete formal specification of the constitutional constraint grammar, seven LTL safety invariants verified by Z3 and NuSMV model checking, and a detailed worked example of Glass Box intercepting an unsafe inference request at eclipse-entry under degraded battery state. As orbital computing scales toward data center infrastructure, runtime constitutional verification is no longer a research novelty -- it is mission-critical safety infrastructure that every autonomous orbital platform will eventually require.