A controller is provided for interactive classification and recognition of an object in a scene using tactile feedback. The controller includes an interface configured to transmit and receive the control, sensor signals from a robot arm, gripper signals from a gripper attached to the robot arm, tactile signals from sensors attached to the gripper and at least one vision sensor, a memory module to store robot control programs, and a classifier and recognition model, and a processor to generate control signals based on the control program and a grasp pose on the object, configured to control the robot arm to grasp the object with the gripper. Further, the processor is configured to compute a tactile feature representation from the tactile sensor signals and to repeat gripping the object and computing a tactile feature representation with the set of grasp poses, after which the processor, processes the ensemble of tactile features to learn a model which is utilized to classify or recognize the object as known or unknown.