The recent technological development has given rise to the transition from the so-called internet of people to the internet of things, and, in this framework, automatic control and intelligent communication networks play an important role. Advanced control schemes are therefore needed to manage increasingly complex systems and overcome the problems related to the unavoidable modelling uncertainties affecting all the physical processes. In order to guarantee stability in presence of uncertainties and external disturbances, robust control techniques have been introduced, taking into account models predictions, optimization based controllers and variable structure controllers. More specifically, Sliding Mode controllers are very light solutions from a computational point of view and represent powerful tools to robustly control uncertain systems. In order to avoid chattering phenomena and fulfil possible constraints on states and inputs of the systems, constrained SMC and integral Higher Order Sliding Mode (HOSM) control solutions have been introduced. Moreover, new algorithms based on a genuine SMC or combined with Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been proposed in case of networked systems. Validation and verification of the proposals have been carried out on robotic systems and power systems.