Sliding Mode Control for Vision based Leader Following

In this paper a discrete-time sliding mode approach for the control of nonholonomic robots performing a leader following task is presented. The task can be seen as a service task for bringing robots to a working area. Our aim is to design, develop and test a new software and hardware framework for formation and coalition problems in a mobile multi robot scenario. Given a desired robot coalition formation, a visual servoing approach is used for tracking. The proposed robust control strategy is also used together with the visual system to recover from failures (when the tracker fails). Real robots experiments are reported, showing the performances of the proposed vision-based follow-the-leader control strategies in an indoor environment.