Implicit Virtual Leader: Decentralized Vision-Only Relative Pose Estimation for Multi-Robot Formations

arXiv:2607.15708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical leader-follower formation control suffers from single points of failure and error propagation, and relies on absolute localization sensors that are ill-suited for GPS-denied environments. We address these limitations by introducing a fully decentralized, vision-only relative pose estimation framework based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The key idea is the implicit virtual leader (IVL): a non-physical formation reference frame that is n...