Resource-Aware Safety-First Active Sensor Acquisition with Few-Shot Commissioning for Edge Fault Warning

Edge monitoring balances diagnostic information against high-rate sensing costs. We formulate active acquisition: Low-cost signals screen each window, while high-information channels are acquired when alarms require confirmation or the screen is uncertain or out of distribution. The confirmation-complete controller includes an optional watchdog to bound blind intervals. On a five-stress benchmark, it retains 98.42% Macro-F1 versus 99.02% for always-full sensing, with 77.59% activation and 19.27% lower normalized resource costs. CWRU evaluation yields 99.25 ± 0.41% Macro-F1 at 83.30% activation. Paderborn condition-transfer evaluation matches always-full sensing at 91.08 ± 17.55% but activates every window; few-shot commissioning increases 15-bearing performance from 58.42 ± 18.60% to 76.52%. When each damage type is excluded from training and bearing identities are separated, the policy activates for 85.25 ± 18.84% of unseen-fault windows versus 83.61 ± 25.69% for a learned error gate. Across 40 healthy-to-unseen replays, 95% activate within five decision windows; an H=10 watchdog limits the inactive run to nine. These rates measure escalation, not unknown-class identification. An ESP32 pilot verifies telemetry feasibility but not sensor-rail power or end-to-end diagnosis. Reduced sensing is credible when the confirm stage transfers; otherwise, commissioning or conservative acquisition is required.