Scalable Multi-Robot Collaboration with Large Language Models: Centralized or Decentralized Systems?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Yongchao, Arkin, Jacob, Zhang, Yang, Roy, Nicholas, Fan, Chuchu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Chen, Yongchao
Arkin, Jacob
Zhang, Yang
Roy, Nicholas
Fan, Chuchu
author_facet Chen, Yongchao
Arkin, Jacob
Zhang, Yang
Roy, Nicholas
Fan, Chuchu
contents A flurry of recent work has demonstrated that pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be effective task planners for a variety of single-robot tasks. The planning performance of LLMs is significantly improved via prompting techniques, such as in-context learning or re-prompting with state feedback, placing new importance on the token budget for the context window. An under-explored but natural next direction is to investigate LLMs as multi-robot task planners. However, long-horizon, heterogeneous multi-robot planning introduces new challenges of coordination while also pushing up against the limits of context window length. It is therefore critical to find token-efficient LLM planning frameworks that are also able to reason about the complexities of multi-robot coordination. In this work, we compare the task success rate and token efficiency of four multi-agent communication frameworks (centralized, decentralized, and two hybrid) as applied to four coordination-dependent multi-agent 2D task scenarios for increasing numbers of agents. We find that a hybrid framework achieves better task success rates across all four tasks and scales better to more agents. We further demonstrate the hybrid frameworks in 3D simulations where the vision-to-text problem and dynamical errors are considered. See our project website https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-Multi-Robot/ for prompts, videos, and code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_15943
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Multi-Robot Collaboration with Large Language Models: Centralized or Decentralized Systems?
Chen, Yongchao
Arkin, Jacob
Zhang, Yang
Roy, Nicholas
Fan, Chuchu
Robotics
A flurry of recent work has demonstrated that pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be effective task planners for a variety of single-robot tasks. The planning performance of LLMs is significantly improved via prompting techniques, such as in-context learning or re-prompting with state feedback, placing new importance on the token budget for the context window. An under-explored but natural next direction is to investigate LLMs as multi-robot task planners. However, long-horizon, heterogeneous multi-robot planning introduces new challenges of coordination while also pushing up against the limits of context window length. It is therefore critical to find token-efficient LLM planning frameworks that are also able to reason about the complexities of multi-robot coordination. In this work, we compare the task success rate and token efficiency of four multi-agent communication frameworks (centralized, decentralized, and two hybrid) as applied to four coordination-dependent multi-agent 2D task scenarios for increasing numbers of agents. We find that a hybrid framework achieves better task success rates across all four tasks and scales better to more agents. We further demonstrate the hybrid frameworks in 3D simulations where the vision-to-text problem and dynamical errors are considered. See our project website https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-Multi-Robot/ for prompts, videos, and code.
title Scalable Multi-Robot Collaboration with Large Language Models: Centralized or Decentralized Systems?
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15943