Blind Dexterity: Whole-Body Humanoid Manipulation via Pure Proprioception

Abstract:We present blind, whole-body manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid using only onboard proprioception, without cameras, markers, force-torque, or tactile sensors. Despite this minimal sensing, the trained policies exhibit surprising capability across qualitatively different tasks: push-resilient bipedal walking without IMU feedback, active soccer ball trapping with a foot, seeking and lifting a suitcase by its handle, and mounting a randomly positioned skateboard. We argue that these capabilities arise from a key underappreciated signal: the way the joint encoder readouts evolve under purposeful compliant contact, effectively forming a whole-body tactile channel. By generating contact-rich motions, the trained policies actively probe the environment; as a result, task-relevant object state (e.g., pose) becomes increasingly decodable from short proprioceptive histories. We expose this information using compact task-specific state estimators trained alongside, but fully separately from, the policies; their prediction errors decrease rapidly after informative contact. Our results indicate that joint encoder-based proprioception, combined with compliant actuation (now widely available on commercial robots and low-cost motors) is already a strong, practical substrate for whole-body dexterous manipulation and interactive perception, and therefore a natural foundation on which richer sensing can be layered.

9 pages, 6 figures. Project page: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.29487 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.29487v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29487 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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