Toward Ownership Understanding of Objects: Active Question Generation with Large Language Model and Probabilistic Generative Model

Robots operating in domestic and office environments must understand object ownership to correctly execute instructions such as ``Bring me my cup.'' However, ownership cannot be reliably inferred from visual features alone. To address this gap, we propose Active Ownership Learning (ActOwL), a framework that enables robots to actively generate and ask ownership-related questions to users. ActOwL employs a probabilistic generative model to select questions that maximize information gain, thereby acquiring ownership knowledge efficiently to improve learning efficiency. Additionally, by leveraging commonsense knowledge from Large Language Models (LLM), objects are pre-classified as either shared or owned, and only owned objects are targeted for questioning. Through experiments in a simulated home environment and a real-world laboratory setting, ActOwL achieved significantly higher ownership clustering accuracy with fewer questions than baseline methods. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining active inference with LLM-guided commonsense reasoning, advancing the capability of robots to acquire ownership knowledge for practical and socially appropriate task execution.

Multi-Robot Task Planning for Multi-Object Retrieval Tasks with Distributed On-Site Knowledge via Large Language Models

It is crucial to efficiently execute instructions such as "Find an apple and a banana" or "Get ready for a field trip," which require searching for multiple objects or understanding context-dependent commands. This study addresses the challenging problem of determining which robot should be assigned to which part of a task when each robot possesses different situational on-site knowledge-specifically, spatial concepts learned from the area designated to it by the user. We propose a task planning framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and spatial concepts to decompose natural language instructions into subtasks and allocate them to multiple robots. We designed a novel few-shot prompting strategy that enables LLMs to infer required objects from ambiguous commands and decompose them into appropriate subtasks. In our experiments, the proposed method achieved 47/50 successful assignments, outperforming random (28/50) and commonsense-based assignment (26/50). Furthermore, we conducted qualitative evaluations using two actual mobile manipulators. The results demonstrated that our framework could handle instructions, including those involving ad hoc categories such as "Get ready for a field trip," by successfully performing task decomposition, assignment, sequential planning, and execution.

Active Exploration based on Information Gain by Particle Filter for Efficient Spatial Concept Formation

Autonomous robots are required to actively and adaptively learn the categories and words of various places by exploring the surrounding environment and interacting with users. In semantic mapping and spatial language acquisition conducted using robots, it is costly and labor-intensive to prepare training datasets that contain linguistic instructions from users. Therefore, we aimed to enable mobile robots to learn spatial concepts through autonomous active exploration. This study is characterized by interpreting the `action' of the robot that asks the user the question `What kind of place is this?' in the context of active inference. We propose an active inference method, spatial concept formation with information gain-based active exploration (SpCoAE), that combines sequential Bayesian inference by particle filters and position determination based on information gain in a probabilistic generative model. Our experiment shows that the proposed method can efficiently determine a position to form appropriate spatial concepts in home environments. In particular, it is important to conduct efficient exploration that leads to appropriate concept formation and quickly covers the environment without adopting a haphazard exploration strategy.