Abstract
Multi-robot navigation in unknown, structurally constrained, and GPS-denied environments presents a fundamental trade-off between global strategic foresight and local tactical agility, particularly under limited communication. Centralized methods achieve global optimality but suffer from high communication overhead, while distributed methods are efficient but lack the broader awareness to avoid deadlocks and topological traps. To address this, we propose a fully decentralized, hierarchical relative navigation framework that achieves both strategic foresight and tactical agility without a unified coordinate system. At the strategic layer, robots build and exchange lightweight topological maps upon opportunistic encounters. This process fosters an emergent global awareness, enabling the planning of efficient, trap-avoiding routes at an abstract level. This high-level plan then inspires the tactical layer, which operates on local metric information. Here, a sampling-based escape point str