A Unified Tactile Servoing Framework based on Hybrid Force-Position Control

In robotics, traditional force control lacks local contact information. Tactile sensors provide rich feedback on physical interaction, but remain notably difficult to integrate into real-time control loops. This paper proposes a unified tactile servoing formulation that allows explicit control of contact pose and force at the Center of Pressure (CoP). Unlike conventional tactile servoing techniques, which are tightly coupled to a specific sensor and often treat the contact wrench as disturbance to be rejected, our approach relies on a generic and physically grounded feature space. We derive a hybrid force-position control law based on the Jacobian at the CoP that naturally decouples force and motion subspaces, ensuring geometric consistency during the contact interaction. Our framework, validated on a robotic manipulator with visionbased tactile sensing, demonstrates robust contact maintenance and force tracking capabilities, outperforming standard imagebased and pose-based controllers in tasks requiring precise regulation of the physical interaction.