Ahana Datta

Raghav Arora, Shivam Singh, Karthik Swaminathan et al. · mit

Assistive agents performing household tasks such as making the bed or cooking breakfast often compute and execute actions that accomplish one task at a time. However, efficiency can be improved by anticipating upcoming tasks and computing an action sequence that jointly achieves these tasks. State-of-the-art methods for task anticipation use data-driven deep networks and Large Language Models (LLMs), but they do so at the level of high-level tasks and/or require many training examples. Our framework leverages the generic knowledge of LLMs through a small number of prompts to perform high-level task anticipation, using the anticipated tasks as goals in a classical planning system to compute a sequence of finer-granularity actions that jointly achieve these goals. We ground and evaluate our framework's abilities in realistic scenarios in the VirtualHome environment and demonstrate a 31% reduction in execution time compared with a system that does not consider upcoming tasks.

Shivam Singh, Karthik Swaminathan, Raghav Arora et al.

An agent assisting humans in daily living activities can collaborate more effectively by anticipating upcoming tasks. Data-driven methods represent the state of the art in task anticipation, planning, and related problems, but these methods are resource-hungry and opaque. Our prior work introduced a proof of concept framework that used an LLM to anticipate 3 high-level tasks that served as goals for a classical planning system that computed a sequence of low-level actions for the agent to achieve these goals. This paper describes DaTAPlan, our framework that significantly extends our prior work toward human-robot collaboration. Specifically, DaTAPlan planner computes actions for an agent and a human to collaboratively and jointly achieve the tasks anticipated by the LLM, and the agent automatically adapts to unexpected changes in human action outcomes and preferences. We evaluate DaTAPlan capabilities in a realistic simulation environment, demonstrating accurate task anticipation, effective human-robot collaboration, and the ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Project website: https://dataplan-hrc.github.io

Nandiraju Gireesh, Ayush Agrawal, Ahana Datta et al.

The Multi-Object Navigation (MultiON) task requires a robot to localize an instance (each) of multiple object classes. It is a fundamental task for an assistive robot in a home or a factory. Existing methods for MultiON have viewed this as a direct extension of Object Navigation (ON), the task of localising an instance of one object class, and are pre-sequenced, i.e., the sequence in which the object classes are to be explored is provided in advance. This is a strong limitation in practical applications characterized by dynamic changes. This paper describes a deep reinforcement learning framework for sequence-agnostic MultiON based on an actor-critic architecture and a suitable reward specification. Our framework leverages past experiences and seeks to reward progress toward individual as well as multiple target object classes. We use photo-realistic scenes from the Gibson benchmark dataset in the AI Habitat 3D simulation environment to experimentally show that our method performs better than a pre-sequenced approach and a state of the art ON method extended to MultiON.