PanTact: Teaching Whole-Body Dexterity with a Wearable Contact Interface

Humanoid robots have many degrees of freedom and contact surfaces, yet most loco-manipulation research restricts manipulation to the hands and avoids other body contacts with the environment. To extend manipulation beyond the hands, we present PanTact, a system that learns humanoid whole-body dexterity, the capability to manipulate with any suitable body surface, directly from robot-free human demonstrations. Our key idea is to use contact as manipulation-centric information that transfers across embodiments. Contact locations and timing specify the interactions needed to accomplish a task, while the robot chooses how to coordinate its body to realize them within its own physical constraints. Specifically, PanTact captures, learns, and executes whole-body contact via: 1) a wearable, robot-free data collection interface that augments egocentric vision and bimanual UMI grippers with whole-body modular contact patches to record body contact locations and states; 2) a visuomotor policy that mitigates the egocentric observation gap and predicts whole-body contact goals; and 3) contact-aware whole-body control formulations that realize active contact goals using suitable robot surfaces. We deploy PanTact on a Unitree G1 humanoid without additional body contact sensors, demonstrating whole-body dexterity involving body support, pushing, sweeping, and load-sharing.