At present, there is a rapid cycle of technology development and innovation in tactile sensing, learning and control. In parallel, there is a need for robots to interact physically with the unstructured environments where humans live, for example to assist humans or perform manual tasks. Together these are attracting increasingly more attention to tactile sensing as an enabling technology for dexterous interaction.

This tutorial will give a detailed introduction to tactile servoing, which is the use of robotic servo control methods with tactile contact data, and may be considered the counterpart of the better-known area of visual servo control that underlies the interaction of robots with their environment using vision.

These tutorial lectures will be composed of three parts.

In Part I, we introduce the fundamentals of the tactile servoing framework, including some background on tactile sensing, how tactile sensory data can be used in feedback control and the relation to visual servo control. This will be an in-person lecture, broadcast online.

In Part II, we cover how these fundamentals of tactile servo control can be applied to different types of tactile sensors, including how tactile features for control are derived from tactile data, and explain how these are used in a range of tactile servoing tasks. This will be an online lecture, shown in-person.

In Part III, we will further facilitate audience engagement and participation with an interactive lecture, where they can try accompanying open-source code for servo control in simulation and interact with demonstrations of tactile servoing. There will be both in-person and online versions.

With this tutorial, we will introduce technologies relevant to tactile servoing to the participants and encourage them to engage with this practical solution for safe robot-environment interaction. We aim to provide this introduction in an accessible, interactive and engaging manner.