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arxivcs.RO2026-07-17

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

Shiyuan Yang, Zelin Wang, Zhijia Tao, Yilin Wang, Zhengyu Hou, Xiaosong Kong, Borong Zhang, Yip Fun Yeung, Yuankai Luo, Sharon Lee, Qingbiao Li

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.

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arxivcs.RO2026-07-24

Plug, Play, and Comply: A Modular Framework for Online Variable Impedance with Arbitrarily Oriented Compliance Axes

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The paper proposes a robot-agnostic compliant-control framework that extends the ROS control ecosystem with standardized joint and Cartesian command interfaces. It addresses a key limitation of existing control software: no reusable infrastructure for implementing compliant-contr…

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