Advancing Human-Robot Interaction Using AI – A Large Language Model (LLM) Approach

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) plays a crucial role towards enabling seamless collaboration between humans and robots, leading to increased productivity, efficiency, and safety in production processes. Robots equipped with advanced sensing capabilities can work alongside humans, performing repetitive and physically demanding tasks, while humans focus on more complex and strategic aspects of production. Several concepts have been presented so far involving a variety of h/w and information exchange means, like gestures, physical and virtual buttons and voice commands. The main drawback identified that limits the fluidity of the interaction is that the commands are pre-programmed and have to be memorized. This paper presents a framework to advance HRI in both execution and programming phases, through the use of AI, exploring large language models (LLMs), allowing humans to communicate in natural language. A reference use case is presented to validate the effectiveness of this approach.