Marc G. Carmichael

Sangmim Song, Sarath Kodagoda, Amal Gunatilake et al.

Navigation presents a significant challenge for persons with visual impairments (PVI). While traditional aids such as white canes and guide dogs are invaluable, they fall short in delivering detailed spatial information and precise guidance to desired locations. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) offer new avenues for enhancing assistive navigation. In this paper, we introduce Guide-LLM, an embodied LLM-based agent designed to assist PVI in navigating large indoor environments. Our approach features a novel text-based topological map that enables the LLM to plan global paths using a simplified environmental representation, focusing on straight paths and right-angle turns to facilitate navigation. Additionally, we utilize the LLM's commonsense reasoning for hazard detection and personalized path planning based on user preferences. Simulated experiments demonstrate the system's efficacy in guiding PVI, underscoring its potential as a significant advancement in assistive technology. The results highlight Guide-LLM's ability to offer efficient, adaptive, and personalized navigation assistance, pointing to promising advancements in this field.

Mitchell Rosser, Marc. G Carmichael

With the recent development of natural language generation models - termed as large language models (LLMs) - a potential use case has opened up to improve the way that humans interact with robot assistants. These LLMs should be able to leverage their large breadth of understanding to interpret natural language commands into effective, task appropriate and safe robot task executions. However, in reality, these models suffer from hallucinations, which may cause safety issues or deviations from the task. In other domains, these issues have been improved through the use of collaborative AI systems where multiple LLM agents can work together to collectively plan, code and self-check outputs. In this research, multiple collaborative AI systems were tested against a single independent AI agent to determine whether the success in other domains would translate into improved human-robot interaction performance. The results show that there is no defined trend between the number of agents and the success of the model. However, it is clear that some collaborative AI agent architectures can exhibit a greatly improved capacity to produce error-free code and to solve abstract problems.