Visible Light Communications with Inherent Agent Localization and Simultaneous Message Receiving Capabilities for Robotic Swarms

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) with a camera solves two problems for swarms, communication and location of sending agent. Information from an LED cluster can be in the form of different colors and/or blinking frequency. The location of the sending agent can be extracted in the local frame of the receiving agent with the camera frame and the centroid of the LED cluster. A camera is necessary because we can parse data from many agents in a single agent’s frame simultaneously. When the camera is not being used to communicate, it can be used to collect information from the environment or usage for other tasks. In this paper we show the ability for a camera to detect different rates of blinking as well as the bit error rate of Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) using this setup. Additionally, we show the feasibility of VLC as a replacement or alternative communication method for robotic swarms.