Various robots, rovers, drones, and other agents of mass-produced products are expected to encounter scenes where they intersect and collaborate in the near future. In such multi-agent systems, individual identification and communication play crucial roles. In this paper, we explore camera-based visible light communication using event cameras to tackle this problem. An event camera captures the events occurring in regions with changes in brightness and can be utilized as a receiver for visible light communication, leveraging its high temporal resolution. Generally, agents with identical appearances in mass-produced products are visually indistinguishable when using conventional CMOS cameras. Therefore, linking visual information with information acquired through conventional radio communication is challenging. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of a visible light communication system employing event cameras and LEDs for visual individual identification over conventional CMOS cameras with ArUco marker recognition. In the simulation, we also verified scenarios where our event camera-based visible light communication outperforms conventional radio communication in situations with visually indistinguishable multi-agents. Finally, our newly implemented multi-agent system verifies its functionality through physical robot experiments.

翻译：各类机器人、探测车、无人机及其他量产代理设备预计将在不久的将来频繁交汇与协作。在此类多智能体系统中，个体识别与通信扮演着关键角色。本文探究了基于事件相机的可见光通信技术以解决该问题。事件相机能够捕捉亮度变化区域的事件，凭借其高时间分辨率可被用作可见光通信的接收器。通常，采用传统CMOS相机时，量产设备中外观相同的智能体在视觉上无法区分。因此，将视觉信息与通过传统无线电通信获取的信息关联起来颇具挑战性。我们通过实验证明了采用事件相机与LED进行视觉个体识别的可见光通信系统相较于结合ArUco标记识别的传统CMOS相机具有优势。在仿真中，我们还验证了在视觉上难以区分的多智能体场景中，基于事件相机的可见光通信优于传统无线电通信的典型情况。最后，我们新实现的多智能体系统通过实物机器人实验验证了其功能。