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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 1, 2026 · UTC

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 t

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