Talk With Machines: Enhancing Human-Robot Interaction Through Large/Vision Language Models

Talk With Machines aims to enhance human-robot interaction in safety-critical industrial systems by integrating large/vision language models with robot control and perception. This allows robots to understand natural language commands and perceive their environment. Translating robots' internal states into human-readable text allows operators to gain clearer insights for safer operations. The paper outlines four workflows: low-level control, language-based feedback, visual input, and robot structure-informed task planning, which are presented in a set of experiments. The proposed approach outperforms the prior method in grasping (100% success vs. 90%) and obstacle avoidance (50% success vs. 30%). Supplementary materials are available on the project website: https://talk-machines.github.io.