Reducing Mental Workload through On-Demand Human Assistance for Physical Action Failures in LLM-based Multi-Robot Coordination

TL;DR

This paper introduces REPAIR, a human-in-the-loop framework that enhances multi-robot task completion by enabling operators to assist with physical failures, significantly improving efficiency and reducing operator workload.

Contribution

The study presents a novel framework integrating remote human assistance into LLM-based multi-robot planning for physical failure recovery, demonstrating improved task progress.

Findings

REPAIR significantly increases task completion in multi-robot trash collection.

For easily collectable items, REPAIR matches full remote control performance.

Operator workload varies in physical demand and effort during assistance.

Abstract

Multi-robot coordination based on large language models (LLMs) has attracted growing attention, since LLMs enable the direct translation of natural language instructions into robot action plans by decomposing tasks and generating high-level plans. However, recovering from physical execution failures remains difficult, and tasks often stagnate due to the repetition of the same unsuccessful actions. While frameworks for remote robot operation using Mixed Reality were proposed, there have been few attempts to implement remote error resolution specifically for physical failures in multi-robot environments. In this study, we propose REPAIR (Robot Execution with Planned And Interactive Recovery), a human-in-the-loop framework that integrates remote error resolution into LLM-based multi-robot planning. In this method, robots execute tasks autonomously; however, when an irrecoverable failure occurs, the LLM requests assistance from an operator, enabling task continuity through remote intervention. Evaluations using a multi-robot trash collection task in a real-world environment confirmed that REPAIR significantly improves task progress (the number of items cleared within a time limit) compared to fully autonomous methods. Furthermore, for easily collectable items, it achieved task progress equivalent to full remote control. The results also suggested that the mental workload on the operator may differ in terms of physical demand and effort. The project website is https://emergentsystemlabstudent.github.io/REPAIR/.