Dobby: A Conversational Service Robot Driven by GPT-4
This work addresses the challenge of creating more interactive and adaptable service robots for applications such as tour-guiding, though it appears incremental as it combines existing AI and robotics components.
The authors tackled the problem of integrating conversational AI into service robots by developing Dobby, a platform that embeds a GPT-4 agent for natural language understanding and decision-making in tasks like tour-guiding, and demonstrated its performance in a human-robot interaction study across five dimensions.
This work introduces a robotics platform which embeds a conversational AI agent in an embodied system for natural language understanding and intelligent decision-making for service tasks; integrating task planning and human-like conversation. The agent is derived from a large language model, which has learned from a vast corpus of general knowledge. In addition to generating dialogue, this agent can interface with the physical world by invoking commands on the robot; seamlessly merging communication and behavior. This system is demonstrated in a free-form tour-guide scenario, in an HRI study combining robots with and without conversational AI capabilities. Performance is measured along five dimensions: overall effectiveness, exploration abilities, scrutinization abilities, receptiveness to personification, and adaptability.