  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.
