Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.12558

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

Xiaomeng Xu·Han Zhang·Zhian Ruan·Xiaofeng Guo·Jinkun Cao·Ruihan Yang·Carmelo Sferrazza·Shuran Song·Guanya Shi
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

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. Website: https://pantact.github.io

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Xiaomeng Xu, Han Zhang, Zhian Ruan, Xiaofeng Guo, Jinkun Cao, Ruihan Yang, Carmelo Sferrazza, Shuran Song, Guanya Shi. 2026-10-08. PanTact: Teaching Whole-Body Dexterity with a Wearable Contact Interface. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12558

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Introducing M: A Modular, Modifiable Social Robot

We present M, an open-source, low-cost tabletop social robot platform aimed at lowering barriers to social robotics research by making robots easier to reproduce, modify, and deploy in real-world settings. M combines a modular mechanical design, multimodal sensing, and expressive yet mechanically simple actuation architecture with a ROS2-native software package that cleanly separates perception, expression control, and data management. The platform includes a simulation environment with interface equivalence to hardware to support easy sim-to-real transfer of interaction behaviors. We demonstrate extensibility through additional sensing/actuation modules and provide example interaction templates for storytelling and two-way conversational coaching. Lastly, we report real-world use of M in interaction design and week-long in-home deployments, showing how M can serve as a practical platform for longitudinal, reproducible social robotics research.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

RadLoc: Radar-based 3-DoF Global Localization via Fast, Robust, and Lightweight Spatial Descriptor Across Diverse Environmental Scenarios

While global localization using spinning radar has gained attention for its robustness to adverse weather and challenging environments, many studies have focused on individual components such as place recognition or pose estimation. In this paper, we take a holistic view of radar sensor-based global localization and present RadLoc, a fast, robust, and lightweight end-to-end pipeline from place recognition to 3-DoF pose estimation. RadLoc accelerates pre-processing using 1D CA-CFAR filtering and leverages the near-range dominance in spinning radar images to design a compact descriptor and an efficient hierarchical coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy. Moreover, coupled with phase correlation-based 3-DoF pose estimation, it forms a versatile global localization module applicable to SLAM and multi-session SLAM systems. Extensive experiments on 15 sequences across 5 datasets demonstrate that RadLoc achieves robust performance while maintaining the smallest descriptor size and fastest retrieval time among state-of-the-art approaches. The supplementary materials are available at https://sparolab.github.io/research/radloc/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Mixture of Frames Policy: Multi-Frame Action Denoising for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

Robotic manipulation is inherently multi-frame: local actions may be simple in an end-effector frame, while transport, upright-object handling, and whole-body coordination are better represented in a base-aligned frame. However, modern diffusion-based visuomotor policies typically commit to a single predefined action frame, forcing one denoiser to model action distributions that are often unnecessarily complex in that frame. We propose Mixture of Frames Policy (MoF), a diffusion policy that performs synchronized action denoising across multiple coordinate frames. MoF maintains a single canonical diffusion state, re-expresses it in several task-relevant frames, applies frame-specialized denoisers, and fuses their noise predictions back in the canonical frame. To make this possible for intermediate noisy diffusion states, we adopt a column-based 6D rotation representation within an SE(3) action parameterization that supports exact, differentiable frame transformations without requiring noisy rotations to lie on the SO(3) manifold. Across nine simulated bimanual manipulation tasks, we show that the best action frame is task-dependent and that MoF improves over oracle frame selection and standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) baselines. We further evaluate MoF on two real-world bimanual mobile manipulation tasks, demonstrating that it outperforms all constituent single-frame baselines.

cs.RO↗