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.

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.

Effective team strategies and joint decision-making processes are fundamental in modern robotic applications, where multiple units have to cooperate to achieve a common goal. The research community in artificial intelligence and robotics has launched robotic competitions to promote research and validate new approaches, by providing robust benchmarks to evaluate all the components of a multiagent system—ranging from hardware to high-level strategy learning. Among these competitionsRoboCuphas a prominent role, running one of the first worldwide multirobot competition (in the late 1990s), challenging researchers to develop robotic systems able to compete in the game of soccer. Robotic soccer teams are complex multirobot systems, where each unit shows individual skills, and solid teamwork by exchanging information about their local perceptions and intentions. In this survey, we dive into the techniques developed within theRoboCupframework by analyzing and commenting on them in detail. We highlight significant trends in the research conducted in the field and to provide commentaries and insights, about challenges and achievements in generating decision-making processes for multirobot adversarial scenarios. As an outcome, we provide an overview a body of work that lies at the intersection of three disciplines: Artificial intelligence, robotics, and games.