Exploring Large Language Models to Facilitate Variable Autonomy for Human-Robot Teaming

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape autonomous tools and robots are becoming commonplace. Recognizing the significance of this development, this paper explores the integration of LLMs like Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) into human-robot teaming environments to facilitate variable autonomy through the means of verbal human-robot communication. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for such a GPT-powered multi-robot testbed environment, based on a Unity Virtual Reality (VR) setting. This system allows users to interact with robot agents through natural language, each powered by individual GPT cores. By means of OpenAI's function calling, we bridge the gap between unstructured natural language input and structure robot actions. A user study with 12 participants explores the effectiveness of GPT-4 and, more importantly, user strategies when being given the opportunity to converse in natural language within a multi-robot environment. Our findings suggest that users may have preconceived expectations on how to converse with robots and seldom try to explore the actual language and cognitive capabilities of their robot collaborators. Still, those users who did explore where able to benefit from a much more natural flow of communication and human-like back-and-forth. We provide a set of lessons learned for future research and technical implementations of similar systems.