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：各式机器人、探测器、无人机及其他量产产品的智能体预计将在不久的将来面临它们相互交汇与协作的场景。在此类多智能体系统中，个体识别与通信发挥着至关重要的作用。本文探索利用事件相机实现基于相机的可见光通信以解决该问题。事件相机能够捕捉亮度变化区域中的事件，并凭借其高时间分辨率可作为可见光通信的接收器。通常，在传统CMOS相机下，量产产品中外观相同的智能体在视觉上难以区分。因此，将视觉信息与传统无线电通信获取的信息相链接颇具挑战性。我们通过实验证明了采用事件相机和LED的可见光通信系统相较于采用ArUco标记识别的传统CMOS相机，在视觉个体识别方面的优越性。在仿真中，我们还验证了当视觉上难以区分多智能体时，基于事件相机的可见光通信优于传统无线电通信的场景。最后，我们新实现的多智能体系统通过物理机器人实验验证了其功能。