DELIVER: A System for LLM-Guided Coordinated Multi-Robot Pickup and Delivery using Voronoi-Based Relay Planning

TL;DR

DELIVER is a comprehensive system enabling natural language-guided, scalable, and collision-free multi-robot pickup and delivery through Voronoi-based relay planning, validated in simulation and real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated framework combining language understanding, spatial decomposition, relay planning, and motion execution for multi-robot coordination.

Findings

Maintains consistent mission cost across team sizes.

Reduces per-agent workload by up to 55%.

Low relay agent count as team size increases.

Abstract

We present DELIVER (Directed Execution of Language-instructed Item Via Engineered Relay), a fully integrated framework for cooperative multi-robot pickup and delivery driven by natural language commands. DELIVER unifies natural language understanding, spatial decomposition, relay planning, and motion execution to enable scalable, collision-free coordination in real-world settings. Given a spoken or written instruction, a lightweight instance of LLaMA3 interprets the command to extract pickup and delivery locations. The environment is partitioned using a Voronoi tessellation to define robot-specific operating regions. Robots then compute optimal relay points along shared boundaries and coordinate handoffs. A finite-state machine governs each robot's behavior, enabling robust execution. We implement DELIVER on the MultiTRAIL simulation platform and validate it in both ROS2-based Gazebo simulations and real-world hardware using TurtleBot3 robots. Empirical results show that DELIVER maintains consistent mission cost across varying team sizes while reducing per-agent workload by up to 55% compared to a single-agent system. Moreover, the number of active relay agents remains low even as team size increases, demonstrating the system's scalability and efficient agent utilization. These findings underscore DELIVER's modular and extensible architecture for language-guided multi-robot coordination, advancing the frontiers of cyber-physical system integration.