arXiv:2610.35344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous IoT systems rely on distributed sensing, but sensor faults and communication loss can leave multichannel evidence incomplete or unreliable. Their agents must therefore classify measurements, assess evidence sufficiency, select a sensor to reacquire, and hand off unsafe decisions. We formulate counterfactual sensing: a degraded window defines the factual state, each candidate restoration defines a controlled alternative, and a pre-request utility model estimates loss reduction. Physics-Guided Invariant-Kinematic Fusion (PGIK-Fusion) constructs class evidence, while calibrated risk and cost-sensitive utility select acceptance, sensor request, or handoff from factual information. On the Logistic Activity Recognition Challenge dataset, PGIK-Fusion achieves 0.768 accuracy and a macro-averaged F1 score (Macro-F1) of 0.696, exceeding extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)--one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) fusion by 2.49 and 2.00 percentage points, respectively. Across seven predefined degradation conditions on held-out subjects, the policy reduces unsafe acceptance from 33.0% to 13.8%; relative to an action-rate-matched random policy, it raises automation accuracy by 18.5 percentage points and lowers expected cost by 24.7%. In the auxiliary within-event wind-turbine study, PGIK-Fusion reaches 0.975 Macro-F1, improves on XGBoost--1D-CNN by 1.17 percentage points, and reduces unsafe acceptance from 20.1% to 8.0%. The evaluation characterizes the controlled responses of a frozen recognition model to specified sensor restorations under predefined fault families and severities. Within this scope, the results demonstrate that calibrated recognition, targeted evidence acquisition, and conservative deferral can form a unified perception--action loop that reduces unsafe automation under sensor degradation.