IntenBot: Flexible and Imprecise Multimodal Input for LLMs to Understand User Intentions for Casual and Human-Like HRI

TL;DR

IntenBot enables human-like, flexible interaction with robots by understanding imprecise multimodal inputs like voice, gaze, and pointing, using LLMs for disambiguation in XR environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces IntenBot, a novel system that interprets casual, imprecise multimodal user inputs for human-robot interaction, leveraging LLMs for filtering and disambiguation.

Findings

IntenBot effectively filters irrelevant input modalities using LLMs.

User study reveals natural multimodal interaction behaviors.

IntenBot performs well in XR and real-world robot deployments.

Abstract

In natural human-to-human communication, multimodal user input is typically used to supplement explicit and complement implicit voice commands, with casualness allowing for flexible input modality combinations and tolerance for imprecise input data. For example, saying "I want that." with a casual glance at a bottle of water is clear enough in human-to-human communication as an implicit voice command accompanied by gaze and/or gestures, rather than an explicit one. To enable such a human-like interaction in human-robot interaction (HRI), we propose a system, IntenBot, to understand user intentions from flexible and imprecise multimodal input, including voice, gaze, and finger-pointing, in XR. The disambiguation capability of large language models (LLMs) is used to filter out irrelevant input modalities and imprecise input data, generating potential instructions for user confirmation. The flexible and imprecise multimodal input enables casual, human-like interaction with robots, reducing time, effort, and attention, and could also be used as non-voice input. We conducted an informative user behavior study in a simulated environment to understand users' natural be- havior in flexibly interacting with a robot using multimodal input and to obtain appropriate angle range parameters for gaze and finger-pointing. An XR study was then performed to evaluate the performance of IntenBot, compared with other methods. We also deployed IntenBot on a physical robot to showcase its real-world applications.