ReContact: Reconstruct and Retarget Human Contacts from Video for Contact-Rich Humanoid Manipulation

Abstract

Contact transitions allow humanoid robots to redistribute object support across the whole body, enabling manipulation beyond hand-only grasps. Human videos provide a scalable source of such transitions for robots to learn from. However, body occlusion disrupts object pose tracking and corrupts retargeted motion. Moreover, accurately reproducing the object trajectory does not ensure that the robot applies stabilizing forces at the intended contacts, risking slips or drops in later phases. To address these challenges, we propose ReContact, which reconstructs and retargets human-object interactions through an object-centric contact plan. The plan specifies contact phases, contact pairs, anchors, pressing directions, and sticking or sliding modes. Contact priors stabilize object pose reconstruction through occlusion. A residual policy over a frozen whole-body tracker is rewarded for making contact at planned anchors with forces aligned to the specified directions. In simulation, on a thigh-supported regrasp task, ReContact achieves the planned two-palm bottom hold in 83.5 of episodes over three training seeds, versus 0.16% for the best adapted baseline. One policy trained on 247 references re-solved for new placements raises in-workspace tube-transfer success from 20.4% (source reference only) to 97.8%. On a real Unitree G1, policies execute seven contact-rich manipulation and two loco-manipulation tasks.