OC-RAP: Observation-Consistent Recovery-Affordance Planner

Safety-critical planning does not end at avoiding first contact. Near the safety boundary, a planner should preserve recoverable continuations; after contact, it should separate, avoid secondary events, and return to a viable state. Under partial observation, however, branch-wise planning can be optimistic: each latent future may admit a recovery while observationally indistinguishable futures require incompatible recovery actions. We formalize this mismatch as an oracle-to-deployable recoverability gap and introduce OC-RAP. For each candidate prefix, OC-RAP rolls out actuator-realizable recovery options under latent roots. Its core operator, OC-MERO, lower-tail aggregates each fixed option over roots compatible with the same post-prefix observation before option selection, preventing hidden root identity from authorizing an unrealizable contingent recovery. A signed margin represents positive recovery reserve and negative recovery debt, providing one recovery semantics before and after contact, while RIFA admits non-nominal actions only when conservative absolute recovery evidence is sufficient and otherwise preserves the exact nominal action. On frozen real-world-motion cohorts executed in closed loop, OC-RAP has zero Safe intervention with nominal-utility preservation (NUP) $=1$. On 250 Near-Contact scenes it obtains the best non-collision clearance p05 (0.661 m), TTC p05 (0.130 s), and TTC-deficit AUC (0.630 s${}^2$), although the best comparator has a lower collision rate and another has shorter critical-TTC exposure. On Contact, OC-RAP attains the shortest overlap, lowest penetration AUC, and largest terminal clearance on the fully paired 8-anchor physical comparison; a complementary continuous re-contact audit gives the highest initial-separation rate (88.5%) and the lowest post-separation re-contact rate (25.0%) and exposure (8.6%). Matched ablations support the roles of observation consistency, executable recovery geometry, absolute admission, and exact-nominal abstention.