A Computational Framework for Cross-Domain Mission Design and Onboard Cognitive Decision Support
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The design of distributed autonomous systems for operation beyond reliable ground contact presents a fundamental tension: as round-trip communication latency grows, the set of decisions delegable to ground operators shrinks. This paper establishes a unified computational methodology for quantifying and comparing this constraint across seven heterogeneous mission architectures, spanning Earth low-orbit surveillance constellations, Mars orbital navigation systems, autonomous underwater mine-clearing swarms, deep-space inter-satellite link networks, and outer-planet in-situ buoy platforms. We introduce the Autonomy Necessity Score, a log-domain latency metric mapping each system continuously from the ground-dependent to the fully-autonomous regime, grounded in nine independently validated computational studies covering Walker spherical-cap coverage mechanics, infrared Neyman-Pearson detection, Extended Kalman Filter hypersonic tracking, cross-mission RF and acoustic link budgets spanning seven orders of magnitude in range, Monte Carlo science-yield sensitivity for TDMA inter-satellite protocols, cross-architecture power budget sizing, distributed magnetic-signature formation emulation, and Arrhenius-corrected cryogenic swarm reliability. Building on this foundation, we evaluate an LLM-based Autonomous Mission Decision Support layer in which three foundation models (Llama-3.3-70B, DeepSeek-V3, and Qwen3-A22B) are queried live via the Nebius AI Studio API across ten structured anomaly scenarios derived directly from the preceding analyses. The best-performing model achieves 80% decision accuracy against physics-grounded ground truth, with all 180 inference calls completing within a 2 s latency budget consistent with radiation-hardened edge deployment, establishing the viability of foundation models as an onboard cognitive layer for high-ANS missions.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: de Curtò, J., Schneider, Adrianne, Yanez, Ricardo, Begara, María, Rodríguez, Álvaro, López, Javier, Fraga, Martina, Gómez, Ignacio, Akdag, Arman, Kulkarni, Sumit, Nair, Siddhant, Govender, Kiyan, Wratchford, Eian, Lynskey, Eli, Dunlap, Seamus, Nervick, Cooper, Tête, Nicolas, Fernández, Rocío, González, Pablo, Municio, Elena, de Zarzà, I.
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Barcelona Supercomputing Center
OpenAlex ID: W7146987462