Infra-Swarm: Robust Vision-Based Multi-Robot Swarming via Near-Infrared Spectral Vision

Haoyu Chen; Qijin Li; Wanyu Xiang; Xiuxiu Lin; Zian Ning; Shiyu Zhao

Infra-Swarm: Robust Vision-Based Multi-Robot Swarming via Near-Infrared Spectral Vision

Robotics 2026-07-14 v1

Authors: Haoyu Chen , Qijin Li , Wanyu Xiang , Xiuxiu Lin , Zian Ning , Shiyu Zhao

Abstract

Distributed swarms typically rely on either active wireless communication or passive vision, and they are frequently hindered by bandwidth constraints or environmental sensitivity. This paper proposes Infra-Swarm, a robust vision-based swarm. Each robot is equipped with a near-infrared light source and four ordinary gray-scale cameras. The Infra-Swarm system directly measures the centimeter-level 3D position of neighbors based on the position (bearing) and intensity (strength) of optical flares in the captured images. By utilizing 940 nm narrow-band filters to physically reject 99.2% of ambient light interference, the perception front-end achieves hardware-level robustness against illumination variations. Furthermore, its minimal computational overhead provides a resilient foundation for the massive scalability of robotic collectives on resource-constrained hardware.

Keywords

multi-robot swarm vision-based near-infrared relative localization robust perception scalability

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.12489,
  title  = {Infra-Swarm: Robust Vision-Based Multi-Robot Swarming via Near-Infrared Spectral Vision},
  author = {Haoyu Chen and Qijin Li and Wanyu Xiang and Xiuxiu Lin and Zian Ning and Shiyu Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12489},
  year   = {2026}
}