CLARA: Classifying and Disambiguating User Commands for Reliable Interactive Robotic Agents

In this letter, we focus on inferring whether the given user command is clear, ambiguous, or infeasible in the context of interactive robotic agents utilizing large language models (LLMs). To tackle this problem, we first present an uncertainty estimation method for LLMs to classify whether the command is certain (i.e., clear) or not (i.e., ambiguous or infeasible). Once the command is classified as uncertain, we further distinguish it between ambiguous or infeasible commands leveraging LLMs with situational aware context prompts. For ambiguous commands, we disambiguate the command by interacting with users via question generation with LLMs. We believe that proper recognition of the given commands could lead to a decrease in malfunction and undesired actions of the robot, enhancing the reliability of interactive robot agents. We present a dataset for robotic situational awareness consisting of pairs of high-level commands, scene descriptions, and labels of command type (i.e., clear, ambiguous, or infeasible). We validate the proposed method on the collected dataset and pick-and-place tabletop simulation environment. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed approach in real-world human-robot interaction experiments.