Towards an appearance-based approach to the leader-follower formation problem

We present in this paper an application of previously developed techniques to the leader-follower formation problem, techniques that exclusively use vision. Contrary to other vision-based methods, the only information needed to perform this task is a set of images of the back of the leader robot that will be tracked by the follower robot. For this, the follower robot controls its (translational and rotational) speed by performing only pixel-wise comparisons between the tracked images and the current image of its surroundings. Results are presented that quantify and qualify the performance of the method in a number of situations, all using real robots in our research lab. Assumptions and limitations are discussed.