Robot Behavior-Tree-Based Task Generation with Large Language Models

Abstract

Nowadays, the behavior tree is gaining popularity as a representation for robot tasks due to its modularity and reusability. Designing behavior-tree tasks manually is time-consuming for robot end-users, thus there is a need for investigating automatic behavior-tree-based task generation. Prior behavior-tree-based task generation approaches focus on fixed primitive tasks and lack generalizability to new task domains. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel behavior-tree-based task generation approach that utilizes state-of-the-art large language models. We propose a Phase-Step prompt design that enables a hierarchical-structured robot task generation and further integrate it with behavior-tree-embedding-based search to set up the appropriate prompt. In this way, we enable an automatic and cross-domain behavior-tree task generation. Our behavior-tree-based task generation approach does not require a set of pre-defined primitive tasks. End-users only need to describe an abstract desired task and our proposed approach can swiftly generate the corresponding behavior tree. A full-process case study is provided to demonstrate our proposed approach. An ablation study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our Phase-Step prompts. Assessment on Phase-Step prompts and the limitation of large language models are presented and discussed.