Utilizing LLMs as a Task Planning Agent for Robotics

This repository is the code for Utilizing LLMs as a Task Planning Agent for Robotics; it is a group project that acted as the capstone project for my Robotics Engineering Masters @ WPI.

This project's aim was to demonstrate that not only can LLMs be used to drive robotic task planning for complex tasks given a set of natural language objectives, but also demonstrate some contextual understanding that goes beyond information known about the world state.

Environment Setup

This blogpost explains the why behind the environment setup. In this repos reference docs/quickstart.md for setting up your environment and installing the necessary dependencies.

Note that we assume that the following environment variables are available if you are utilizing those services:

• OPENAI_API_KEY - the OpenAPI provider key
• GOOGLE_API_KEY - an API key or service account key for accessing PaLM2 API endpoints for GCP
• ELEVENLABS_API_KEY - for AI thoughts to voice; optional

Building code

In ros_ws in your chosen environment run colcon build to build the code. Note that you'll likely have to also run pip install -r requirements.txt to setup your Python environment. If you are using a python virtual environment be sure to activate it when running launch files as well.

Note that sometimes there are issues with your Python virtual environments and ROS2 base Python packages. If this occurs you may need to do additional work linking the library modules into your virtual environment.

Running the Planner

To run all appropriate code, create N??? terminal windows and run the following in order. For each terminal, source your environment with:

cd ros_ws/
source install/setup.bash

First, we launch the environment, robot, navigation backend, RVIZ, and Gazebo

ros2 launch aws-robomaker-small-house-world house.map.launch.py

Then we load the query_services module to run the state service. If you wish to use a prepared database of known items, copy state_db.db.fresh to state_db.db within your working directory.

ros2 launch query_services state_query_launch.py

We then launch litterbug service to populate the world with items and manage simulated vision and interaction:

ros2 launch litterbug litterbug.launch.py

We can lauch the AI service itself to launch the task planner:

ros2 launch planner ai.launch.py

Once running, you may also wish to stream important control information as it occurs within the AI system. To do this, run the ai_streamer software from the ros_ws/src/planner directory:

cd ros_ws/src/planner
python ai_streamer.py

To trigger an objective to be planned and executed, you can use the ros2 service call command to the /objective endpoint.

 ros2 topic pub /objective my_package/msg/Objective 'id: "01", objective: "I'm kind of hungry"'