Blind Dexterity: Whole-Body Humanoid Manipulation via Pure Proprioception

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29487v1
• Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:32:01 GMT
• Title: Blind Dexterity: Whole-Body Humanoid Manipulation via Pure Proprioception
• Abstract summary: We present blind, whole-body manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid.<n>We use only onboard proprioception, without cameras, markers, force-torque, or tactile sensors.
• Score: 15.745680450613854
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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