Vision-Based Guidance and Switching-Based Sliding Mode Controller for a Mobile Robot in the Cyber Physical Framework

This paper proposes a vision-based guidance strategy for safe navigation of a nonholonomic mobile robot in unknown indoor environments. The proposed switching-based sliding mode control (SMC) law makes the robot follow the desired trajectory as given by the guidance law. The guidance strategy uses the centroid of the depth map of an obstacle as obtained from the Red Green Blue-Depth (RGB-D) sensor to generate the desired angular velocity. The fuzzy rule-based guidance is developed to generate the desired linear velocity command. The analysis of guidance strategy is done for an infinite length obstacle. The proposed SMC is shown to be asymptotically stable using Krasovskii Method. The finite time convergence of robot navigation has been shown using Poincare Map method. The stability of the proposed SMC under burst losses has also been established. Experiments on the Pioneer P3-DX robot in different obstacle scenarios show that the robot safely navigates in presence of communication channel burst losses.