Managed Autonomy at Runtime: Gear-Based Safety and Governance for Single- and Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Autonomous agents, whether LLM-driven software agents or robotic physical agents, face a common class of failure modes when operating without continuous human oversight: safety violations from unverified actions, behavioral instability from unconstrained loops, and continuity loss from unhandled error states. We develop \system{}, a discrete-time control system that combines five execution gears (\Gobs{}, \Gsug{}, \Gplan{}, \Gexec{}, \Gint{}) with utility-gated dispatch and event-driven fallback. For the single-agent case, we prove monotonic stability, execution safety, eventual stabilization, fallback completeness, and equivalence to a gear-constrained Markov decision process. For multi-agent cyber-physical systems (CPS), we apply the established \smart{} managed-autonomy lifecycle and map runtime evidence into its four governance states (\Stable{}/\Meta{}/\Assisted{}/\Regulated{}). Consensus gating, swarm-level Lyapunov analysis, per-agent gear authority, and rendezvous control provide distributed safety and stability guarantees, including zero collision under the stated assumptions. We evaluate the resulting runtime on a three-agent UR5 robotic assembly cell using fault magnitudes calibrated from the NIST \emph{Degradation Measurement of Robot Arm Position Accuracy} dataset across 10,000 Monte Carlo episodes. It achieves a 99.6\% anomaly detection rate versus 2.1\% for the single-agent baseline, reduces detection latency by $3.5\times$, and supplies a formal physical-workspace safety certificate. The execution gears act as micro-level permissions beneath the \smart{} runtime governance states, separating action control from autonomy governance.