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 not tied to any individual robot but is implicitly learned within the GNN using only monocular images and inter-robot communication. We attach a heteroscedastic GNLL head for aleatoric uncertainty and MC~Dropout for epistemic uncertainty, and conduct a systematic comparison across simulation and real-world test sets. Our framework achieves competitive pose estimation accuracy and generalizes naturally to heterogeneous robot platforms and varying formation sizes.
The successful integration of mobile robots in human-centric environments requires navigation that is not only safe and efficient, but also predictable and aligned with social conventions, key precursors for human comfort and acceptance. While significant research addresses short…
Trajectory optimization for multi-robot systems remains a critical challenge, particularly when navigating highly non-convex, non-linear, and non-differentiable environments. While Model-Based Diffusion (MBD) has recently emerged as a promising sampling-based optimization paradig…
Relative pose estimation is a fundamental capability for collaborative perception and coordination in multi-robot systems. However, robots encountering each other in real-world environments often operate in short interaction windows and must operate under limited communication ba…
Deploying drone swarms to track a dynamic target in cluttered environments presents severe computational and safety challenges. We propose MROPE, a hierarchical strategy that decouples the cooperative monitoring mission from strict local safety requirements. To overcome the compu…
In robotic autonomous luggage trolley collection, robots must continuously localize scattered luggage trolleys in cluttered and dynamic environments. This requires the vision system to achieve both high accuracy and real-time performance. However, existing visual perception appro…
6D pose estimation remains a key challenge in robotics and computer vision, particularly in industrial environments. The deployment of currently available data-driven methods is often limited by resource-intensive data pipelines, reliance on textured 3D models, and sensitivity to…