Vision-Based Leader-Follower Formation Control for Cooperative UAVs in GPS-Degraded Environments

Abstract:Cooperation in multi-UAV systems requires reliable relative perception so that follower vehicles can maintain formation and continue their mission safely even when absolute positioning sensors degrade or fail. This paper presents a vision-based cooperative formation framework running on a follower UAV that uses a front-facing RGB-D camera to detect, track, and localize a leader UAV in real-time. A lightweight YOLO-based detector is trained on a dedicated drone dataset and deployed onboard to predict leader bounding boxes, which are then fused with depth information via a pinhole camera model to estimate the leader's relative pose. These estimates provide a leader-follower position controller and can also be used as a backup when GPS or external localization is unavailable. This framework is implemented as a set of ROS nodes and evaluated in a physics-based multi-UAV simulation built on XTDrone, with sensor noise and communication dropouts. We evaluate detection accuracy, runtime, and formation-keeping error under nominal conditions and under simulated failures of the positioning sensors. The results show that the proposed framework maintains stable leader-follower formations with reasonable computational cost and provides a practical basis for extending vision-based cooperative formation control to real-world multi-UAV systems.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.01420 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.01420v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01420 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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