Pipeline of the Proposed VBT-MPC for contour following by touch.
Tactile sensing plays a key role in robotic manipulation, particularly in tasks like surface inspection. Successful execution requires maintaining contact while accurately tracking object contours. In this work, we propose a Vision-Based Tactile Model Predictive Control (VBT-MPC) framework for robotic contour following using a Vision-Based Tactile Sensor (VBTS) mounted in an eye-in-hand configuration. The proposed controller operates directly in contour features space, thereby avoiding the need for separate pose-estimation modules or complex force-control architectures. We further compare our VBT-MPC with visual-servoing strategies adapted to tactile features, and evaluate contour tracking on objects with diverse geometries and materials in both simulation and real-world experiments.
@ARTICLE{velasco2026vbtmpc,
author={Velasco-Sanchez, Edison and Recalde, Luis F. and Li, Guanrui and Gil, Pablo},
journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
title={VBT-MPC: Vision-Based Tactile MPC for Contour Following},
year={2026},
volume={11},
number={7},
pages={8504-8511},
keywords={Contacts;Modeling;Silicon;Image sensors;End effectors;Robots;Tactile sensors;Timing;Visual systems;Surfaces;Visual servoing;force and tactile sensing;sensor-based control},
doi={10.1109/LRA.2026.3698362}
}