Survey - FMs in Robotics

• SlideDeck: W3.2-GenAI-Robotics
• Version: current
• Lead team: team-3
• Notes: GenAI for Robotics

Applications

In this session, our readings cover:

Required Readings:

A Survey on Integration of Large Language Models with Intelligent Robots

• [Submitted on 14 Apr 2024 (v1), last revised 15 Aug 2024 (this version, v5)]
• Yeseung Kim, Dohyun Kim, Jieun Choi, Jisang Park, Nayoung Oh, Daehyung Park
• In recent years, the integration of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of robotics, enabling robots to communicate, understand, and reason with human-like proficiency. This paper explores the multifaceted impact of LLMs on robotics, addressing key challenges and opportunities for leveraging these models across various domains. By categorizing and analyzing LLM applications within core robotics elements – communication, perception, planning, and control – we aim to provide actionable insights for researchers seeking to integrate LLMs into their robotic systems. Our investigation focuses on LLMs developed post-GPT-3.5, primarily in text-based modalities while also considering multimodal approaches for perception and control. We offer comprehensive guidelines and examples for prompt engineering, facilitating beginners’ access to LLM-based robotics solutions. Through tutorial-level examples and structured prompt construction, we illustrate how LLM-guided enhancements can be seamlessly integrated into robotics applications. This survey serves as a roadmap for researchers navigating the evolving landscape of LLM-driven robotics, offering a comprehensive overview and practical guidance for harnessing the power of language models in robotics development.

Large Language Models for Robotics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Perspectives

• Jiaqi Wang, Zihao Wu, Yiwei Li, Hanqi Jiang, Peng Shu, Enze Shi, Huawen Hu, Chong Ma, Yiheng Liu, Xuhui Wang, Yincheng Yao, Xuan Liu, Huaqin Zhao, Zhengliang Liu, Haixing Dai, Lin Zhao, Bao Ge, Xiang Li, Tianming Liu, Shu Zhang
• Large language models (LLMs) have undergone significant expansion and have been increasingly integrated across various domains. Notably, in the realm of robot task planning, LLMs harness their advanced reasoning and language comprehension capabilities to formulate precise and efficient action plans based on natural language instructions. However, for embodied tasks, where robots interact with complex environments, text-only LLMs often face challenges due to a lack of compatibility with robotic visual perception. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs and multimodal LLMs into various robotic tasks. Additionally, we propose a framework that utilizes multimodal GPT-4V to enhance embodied task planning through the combination of natural language instructions and robot visual perceptions. Our results, based on diverse datasets, indicate that GPT-4V effectively enhances robot performance in embodied tasks. This extensive survey and evaluation of LLMs and multimodal LLMs across a variety of robotic tasks enriches the understanding of LLM-centric embodied intelligence and provides forward-looking insights toward bridging the gap in Human-Robot-Environment interaction.

A Survey of Robot Intelligence with Large Language Models

• https://doi.org/10.3390/app14198868
• Submission received: 6 September 2024 / Revised: 24 September 2024 / Accepted: 25 September 2024 / Published: 2 October 2024
• (This article belongs to the Special Issue Advancements in Intelligent Systems: The Confluence of AI, Machine Learning, and Robotics)
• Since the emergence of ChatGPT, research on large language models (LLMs) has actively progressed across various fields. LLMs, pre-trained on vast text datasets, have exhibited exceptional abilities in understanding natural language and planning tasks. These abilities of LLMs are promising in robotics. In general, traditional supervised learning-based robot intelligence systems have a significant lack of adaptability to dynamically changing environments. However, LLMs help a robot intelligence system to improve its generalization ability in dynamic and complex real-world environments. Indeed, findings from ongoing robotics studies indicate that LLMs can significantly improve robots’ behavior planning and execution capabilities. Additionally, vision-language models (VLMs), trained on extensive visual and linguistic data for the vision question answering (VQA) problem, excel at integrating computer vision with natural language processing. VLMs can comprehend visual contexts and execute actions through natural language. They also provide descriptions of scenes in natural language. Several studies have explored the enhancement of robot intelligence using multimodal data, including object recognition and description by VLMs, along with the execution of language-driven commands integrated with visual information. This review paper thoroughly investigates how foundation models such as LLMs and VLMs have been employed to boost robot intelligence. For clarity, the research areas are categorized into five topics: reward design in reinforcement learning, low-level control, high-level planning, manipulation, and scene understanding. This review also summarizes studies that show how foundation models, such as the Eureka model for automating reward function design in reinforcement learning, RT-2 for integrating visual data, language, and robot actions in vision-language-action models, and AutoRT for generating feasible tasks and executing robot behavior policies via LLMs, have improved robot intelligence. Keywords: embodied intelligence; foundation model; large language model (LLM); vision-language model (VLM); vision-language-action (VLA) model; robotics

More Readings: