Optical LiDAR Communication: Repurposing Existing LiDAR Sensors for Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Communication

As autonomous mobile robots increasingly operate in real-world environments, safety has emerged as a critical challenge, particularly regarding obstacle and pedestrian detection in building blind spots and reliable traffic signal recognition. While traditional Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) systems adopt high-capacity communication through 5G networks or via Optical Wireless Communication (OWC), these approaches require dedicated communication hardware that proves impractical for small, low-cost robots. Additionally, the communication bandwidth required for robot-oriented V2I, such as blind spot object detection and traffic signal states, is relatively limited; the high-capacity communication of 5G is often unnecessary. To address these challenges, we propose a novel optical communication system named Optical LiDAR Communication (OLC), which repurposes existing LiDAR sensors as communication devices. By integrating LiDAR Injection with 2D Code technology, OLC achieves cost-effectiveness through V2I communication without requiring additional hardware on robots. Real-world experiments confirmed that the proposed method achieves a communication success rate of over 76% at distances up to 30 meters. Furthermore, as a proof-of-concept, we develop two key V2I systems utilizing OLC: traffic signal information transmission and blind-spot obstacle detection, and real-time communication performance was demonstrated. These results indicate that the proposed method has potential as a V2I platform for next-generation robotics infrastructure.