Real-Time Multimodal Signal Processing for HRI in RoboCup: Understanding a Human Referee

Advancing human-robot communication is crucial for autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, where accurate real-time interpretation of human signals is essential. RoboCup provides a compelling scenario for testing these capabilities, requiring robots to understand referee gestures and whistle with minimal network reliance. Using the NAO robot platform, this study implements a two-stage pipeline for gesture recognition through keypoint extraction and classification, alongside continuous convolutional neural networks (CCNNs) for efficient whistle detection. The proposed approach enhances real-time human-robot interaction in a competitive setting like RoboCup, offering some tools to advance the development of autonomous systems capable of cooperating with humans.

EMPOWER: Embodied Multi-role Open-vocabulary Planning with Online Grounding and Execution

Task planning for robots in real-life settings presents significant challenges. These challenges stem from three primary issues: the difficulty in identifying grounded sequences of steps to achieve a goal; the lack of a standardized mapping between high-level actions and low-level commands; and the challenge of maintaining low computational overhead given the limited resources of robotic hardware. We introduce EMPOWER, a framework designed for open-vocabulary online grounding and planning for embodied agents aimed at addressing these issues. By leveraging efficient pre-trained foundation models and a multi-role mechanism, EMPOWER demonstrates notable improvements in grounded planning and execution. Quantitative results highlight the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an average success rate of 0.73 across six different real-life scenarios using a TIAGo robot.

Multi-agent Planning using Visual Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) are attracting increasing interest due to their improving performance and applications across various domains and tasks. However, LLMs and VLMs can produce erroneous results, especially when a deep understanding of the problem domain is required. For instance, when planning and perception are needed simultaneously, these models often struggle because of difficulties in merging multi-modal information. To address this issue, fine-tuned models are typically employed and trained on specialized data structures representing the environment. This approach has limited effectiveness, as it can overly complicate the context for processing. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent architecture for embodied task planning that operates without the need for specific data structures as input. Instead, it uses a single image of the environment, handling free-form domains by leveraging commonsense knowledge. We also introduce a novel, fully automatic evaluation procedure, PG2S, designed to better assess the quality of a plan. We validated our approach using the widely recognized ALFRED dataset, comparing PG2S to the existing KAS metric to further evaluate the quality of the generated plans.

Shape and Style GAN-based Multispectral Data Augmentation for Crop/Weed Segmentation in Precision Farming

The use of deep learning methods for precision farming is gaining increasing interest. However, collecting training data in this application field is particularly challenging and costly due to the need of acquiring information during the different growing stages of the cultivation of interest. In this paper, we present a method for data augmentation that uses two GANs to create artificial images to augment the training data. To obtain a higher image quality, instead of re-creating the entire scene, we take original images and replace only the patches containing objects of interest with artificial ones containing new objects with different shapes and styles. In doing this, we take into account both the foreground (i.e., crop samples) and the background (i.e., the soil) of the patches. Quantitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The source code and data discussed in this work are available as open source.

LLCoach: Generating Robot Soccer Plans using Multi-Role Large Language Models

The deployment of robots into human scenarios necessitates advanced planning strategies, particularly when we ask robots to operate in dynamic, unstructured environments. RoboCup offers the chance to deploy robots in one of those scenarios, a human-shaped game represented by a soccer match. In such scenarios, robots must operate using predefined behaviors that can fail in unpredictable conditions. This paper introduces a novel application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to address the challenge of generating actionable plans in such settings, specifically within the context of the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL) competitions where robots are required to autonomously execute soccer strategies that emerge from the interactions of individual agents. In particular, we propose a multi-role approach leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to generate and refine plans for a robotic soccer team. The potential of the proposed method is demonstrated through an experimental evaluation,carried out simulating multiple matches where robots with AI-generated plans play against robots running human-built code.

Play Everywhere: A Temporal Logic based Game Environment Independent Approach for Playing Soccer with Robots

Robots playing soccer often rely on hard-coded behaviors that struggle to generalize when the game environment change. In this paper, we propose a temporal logic based approach that allows robots' behaviors and goals to adapt to the semantics of the environment. In particular, we present a hierarchical representation of soccer in which the robot selects the level of operation based on the perceived semantic characteristics of the environment, thus modifying dynamically the set of rules and goals to apply. The proposed approach enables the robot to operate in unstructured environments, just as it happens when humans go from soccer played on an official field to soccer played on a street. Three different use cases set in different scenarios are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

LLM Based Multi-Agent Generation of Semi-structured Documents from Semantic Templates in the Public Administration Domain

In the last years' digitalization process, the creation and management of documents in various domains, particularly in Public Administration (PA), have become increasingly complex and diverse. This complexity arises from the need to handle a wide range of document types, often characterized by semi-structured forms. Semi-structured documents present a fixed set of data without a fixed format. As a consequence, a template-based solution cannot be used, as understanding a document requires the extraction of the data structure. The recent introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled the creation of customized text output satisfying user requests. In this work, we propose a novel approach that combines the LLMs with prompt engineering and multi-agent systems for generating new documents compliant with a desired structure. The main contribution of this work concerns replacing the commonly used manual prompting with a task description generated by semantic retrieval from an LLM. The potential of this approach is demonstrated through a series of experiments and case studies, showcasing its effectiveness in real-world PA scenarios.

Multi-Agent Coordination for a Partially Observable and Dynamic Robot Soccer Environment with Limited Communication

RoboCup represents an International testbed for advancing research in AI and robotics, focusing on a definite goal: developing a robot team that can win against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. To achieve this goal, autonomous humanoid robots' coordination is crucial. This paper explores novel solutions within the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL), where a reduction in WiFi communication is imperative, leading to the development of new coordination paradigms. The SPL has experienced a substantial decrease in network packet rate, compelling the need for advanced coordination architectures to maintain optimal team functionality in dynamic environments. Inspired by market-based task assignment, we introduce a novel distributed coordination system to orchestrate autonomous robots' actions efficiently in low communication scenarios. This approach has been tested with NAO robots during official RoboCup competitions and in the SimRobot simulator, demonstrating a notable reduction in task overlaps in limited communication settings.

Enhancing Graph Representation of the Environment through Local and Cloud Computation

Enriching the robot representation of the operational environment is a challenging task that aims at bridging the gap between low-level sensor readings and high-level semantic understanding. Having a rich representation often requires computationally demanding architectures and pure point cloud based detection systems that struggle when dealing with everyday objects that have to be handled by the robot. To overcome these issues, we propose a graph-based representation that addresses this gap by providing a semantic representation of robot environments from multiple sources. In fact, to acquire information from the environment, the framework combines classical computer vision tools with modern computer vision cloud services, ensuring computational feasibility on onboard hardware. By incorporating an ontology hierarchy with over 800 object classes, the framework achieves cross-domain adaptability, eliminating the need for environment-specific tools. The proposed approach allows us to handle also small objects and integrate them into the semantic representation of the environment. The approach is implemented in the Robot Operating System (ROS) using the RViz visualizer for environment representation. This work is a first step towards the development of a general-purpose framework, to facilitate intuitive interaction and navigation across different domains.

Preserving HRI Capabilities: Physical, Remote and Simulated Modalities in the SciRoc 2021 Competition

In the last years, robots are moving out of research laboratories to enter everyday life. Competitions aiming at benchmarking the capabilities of a robot in everyday scenarios are useful to make a step forward in this path. In fact, they foster the development of robust architectures capable of solving issues that might occur during human-robot coexistence in human-shaped scenarios. One of those competitions is SciRoc that, in its second edition, proposed new benchmarking environments. In particular, Episode 1 of SciRoc 2 proposed three different modalities of participation while preserving the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), being a fundamental benchmarking functionality. The Coffee Shop environment, used to challenge the participating teams, represented an excellent testbed enabling for the benchmarking of different robotics functionalities, but also an exceptional opportunity for proposing novel solutions to guarantee real human-robot interaction procedures despite the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The developed software is publicly released.