The paper introduces a new vision-based range estimator for leader-follower formation control, based upon the Immersion and Invariance (I&I) methodology. The proposed reduced-order nonlinear observer is simple to implement, easy to tune and achieves global asymptotical convergence of the observation error to zero. Observability conditions for the leader-follower system are analytically derived by studying the singularity of the Extended Output Jacobian. The stability of the closed-loop system arising from the combination of the range estimator and an input-state feedback controller is proved by means of Lyapunov arguments. Simulation experiments illustrate the theory and show the effectiveness of the proposed designs. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.