Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is an emerging technology that integrates wireless sensing and communication into a single system, transforming many applications, including cooperative mobile robotics. However, in scenarios where radio communications are unavailable, alternative approaches are needed. In this paper, we propose a new optical ISAC (OISAC) scheme for cooperative mobile robots by integrating camera sensing and screen-camera communication (SCC). Unlike previous throughput-oriented SCC designs that work with stationary SCC links, our OISAC scheme is designed for real-time control of mobile robots. It addresses new problems such as image blur and long image display delay. As a case study, we consider the leader-follower formation control problem, an essential part of cooperative mobile robotics. The proposed OISAC scheme enables the follower robot to simultaneously acquire the information shared by the leader and sense the relative pose to the leader using only RGB images captured by its onboard camera. We then design a new control law that can leverage all the information acquired by the camera to achieve stable and accurate formations. We design and conduct real-world experiments involving uniform and nonuniform motions to evaluate the proposed system and demonstrate the advantages of applying OISAC over a benchmark approach that uses extended Kalman filtering (EKF) to estimate the leader's states. Our results show that the proposed OISAC-augmented leader-follower formation system achieves better performance in terms of accuracy, stability, and robustness.

翻译：集成感知与通信（ISAC）是一种新兴技术，它将无线感知与通信集成于单一系统，推动包括协作移动机器人在内的诸多应用变革。然而，在无法使用无线电通信的场景中，需探索替代方案。本文针对协作移动机器人提出一种新型光学ISAC（OISAC）方案，通过融合摄像头感知与屏幕-摄像头通信（SCC）实现。不同于以往面向吞吐率优化、基于静态SCC链路的设计，我们的OISAC方案专用于移动机器人的实时控制，解决了图像模糊、长图像显示延迟等新问题。以协作移动机器人核心场景——领航-跟随编队控制问题为案例，所提OISAC方案使跟随机器人能够仅通过自身摄像头获取的RGB图像，同步获取领航机器人共享的信息并感知相对位姿。继而设计新的控制律，充分运用摄像头获取的信息实现稳定精确编队。我们通过包含匀速与非匀速运动的真实实验评估系统性能，并展示OISAC相较采用扩展卡尔曼滤波（EKF）估计领航者状态的基准方法的优势。结果表明，所提OISAC增强型领航-跟随编队系统在精度、稳定性和鲁棒性方面表现更优。