ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ChatGPT can be adapted for robotics tasks through prompt engineering, high-level function libraries, and dialog strategies, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse robotics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive design framework for using ChatGPT in robotics, including prompt techniques, a new open-source tool PromptCraft, and a robotics simulator with ChatGPT integration.

Findings

ChatGPT effectively solves various logical, geometrical, and mathematical tasks.

Prompt engineering and dialog strategies enhance ChatGPT's performance in robotics.

Open-source tools facilitate research and application development in ChatGPT-based robotics.

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study regarding the use of OpenAI's ChatGPT for robotics applications. We outline a strategy that combines design principles for prompt engineering and the creation of a high-level function library which allows ChatGPT to adapt to different robotics tasks, simulators, and form factors. We focus our evaluations on the effectiveness of different prompt engineering techniques and dialog strategies towards the execution of various types of robotics tasks. We explore ChatGPT's ability to use free-form dialog, parse XML tags, and to synthesize code, in addition to the use of task-specific prompting functions and closed-loop reasoning through dialogues. Our study encompasses a range of tasks within the robotics domain, from basic logical, geometrical, and mathematical reasoning all the way to complex domains such as aerial navigation, manipulation, and embodied agents. We show that ChatGPT can be effective at solving several of such tasks, while allowing users to interact with it primarily via natural language instructions. In addition to these studies, we introduce an open-sourced research tool called PromptCraft, which contains a platform where researchers can collaboratively upload and vote on examples of good prompting schemes for robotics applications, as well as a sample robotics simulator with ChatGPT integration, making it easier for users to get started with using ChatGPT for robotics.