Teleop fed the sidewalk axis a command beyond its training band - feet clipped; give each axis its own speed setting

Symptom

Robot stepped on its own foot when sidewalking left under teleop - and only when going left.

Context

The teleop tool used one speed setting for all axes: --teleop-speed 0.20 applied to A/D sent cmd_vy = 0.20, above the training band's top (0.08-0.18) where foot-spacing margin is thinnest. Sim reproduction of the incident (product policy, pw0.8, 5 seeds x 20 s, true collision threshold = single foot width 104 mm): at vy 0.20 the minimum foot distance was 111-115 mm - 7-11 mm from self-collision - vs 147 mm at vy 0.10. Left was 4x more dangerous than right (25% vs 6% of time inside the 160 mm soft wall at vy 0.10), matching the left-only symptom; the margin did not degrade over time (pressing more just lengthened exposure).

Change

deploy_policy gained --teleop-side (default 0.10), separating the lateral speed from the forward speed so each axis's teleop command sits inside its own trained band.

Outcome

Command now inside the band with 43 mm margin at default; the incident became a quantified, reproduced, closed account rather than a mystery.

Mechanism

The policy's competence envelope is the training command distribution per axis; teleop mappings that share one scalar across axes silently command out-of-band inputs on the weakest axis. Asymmetric risk (left vs right) came from the policy's own chirality bias, so a symmetric command produced an asymmetric hazard.

Applies when

• wiring a joystick/teleop layer over a learned policy
• a hardware incident occurs on one command direction only
• training bands differ across command axes