We present Logical Robots, an interactive multi-agent simulation platform where autonomous robot behavior is specified declaratively in the logic programming language Logica. Robot behavior is defined by logical predicates that map observations from simulated radar arrays and shared memory to desired motor outputs. This approach allows low-level reactive control and high-level planning to coexist within a single programming environment, providing a coherent framework for exploring multi-agent robot behavior.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Multi-robot exploration with sensor rays (red endpoints: wall, green endpoints: beacon) and dynamic area toggling triggered by specific beacon detection (e.g., Fire Station).
Figure 2. Distributed mapping scenario: robots collaboratively explore a beacon-filled labyrinth, building a shared navigation graph to find their way “Home.”
Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly trained on imperative programming languages, and existing work on LLM-based robot programming reflects this: it focuses on goal-directed tasks expressed as plans. However, many robotic applications require not tasks but behaviors--open-ended, continuous patterns of sensory-motor engagement with no termination condition (e.g., greeting visitors, patrolling an area). Such behaviors are better served by declarative and reactive programming, on which LLMs have virtually no training. We investigate whether this gap can be bridged. Using Playful, a reactive scripting language, we show that an LLM-based coding agent can generate correct declarative and reactive programs for robotic behaviors. These programs are produced from under-specified natural language descriptions, given suitable context and a set of reusable programming guidelines. The guidelines encode design principles that redirect the agent from imperative defaults toward proper reactive patterns. Developed once by an expert, they generalize across robots and behaviors. Starting from only the generic robot operating system API, the agent jointly designs both the imperative component (Python modules for sensing, acting, and evaluating) and the declarative component (the reactive script that composes them into behavior logic). The declarative nature of reactive programming supports both incremental refinement through conversational turns and one-shot generation of complete behaviors.
Vincent Berenz, Tasha Kim, Bernhard Schölkopf
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany · University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom · ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Germany +1
This paper presents a framework to prompt multi-robot teams with high-level tasks using natural language expressions. Our objective is to use the reasoning capabilities of language models in understanding and decomposing multi-robot collaboration and decision-making tasks, but in settings where such models cannot be called at deployment time. However, it is hard to specify the behavior of an individual robot from a team instruction, and have it continuously adapt to actions from other robots. This necessitates a framework with the representational capacity required by the logic and semantics of a task, and yet supports decentralized, real-time operation. We solve this dilemma by recognizing that a task can be represented as a deterministic finite automaton, and that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can encode numerous automata. This allows us to distill the logic and sequential decompositions of sub-tasks obtained from a language model into an RNN, and align its internal states with the semantics of a given task. This leads to a tiny model that encapsulates the reasoning of the language model and can be implemented onboard. To interpret the internal state of the RNN for a decentralized execution, we train a graph neural network control policy conditioned on the hidden states of the RNN and the language embeddings. We present evaluations on simulated and real-world multi-robot tasks that require sequential and collaborative behavior by the team, demonstrating scalable, robust, real-time performance -- sites.google.com/view/prompting-teams.
Eduardo Sebastián, Nicolas Pfitzer, Ajay Shankar +1
Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK · Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Human-robot interaction is increasingly moving toward multi-robot, socially grounded environments. Existing systems struggle to integrate multimodal perception, embodied expression, and coordinated decision-making in a unified framework. This limits natural and scalable interaction in shared physical spaces. We address this gap by introducing a multimodal framework for human-multi-agent interaction in which each robot operates as an autonomous cognitive agent with integrated multimodal perception and Large Language Model (LLM)-driven planning grounded in embodiment. At the team level, a centralized coordination mechanism regulates turn-taking and agent participation to prevent overlapping speech and conflicting actions. Implemented on two humanoid robots, our framework enables coherent multi-agent interaction through interaction policies that combine speech, gesture, gaze, and locomotion. Representative interaction runs demonstrate coordinated multimodal reasoning across agents and grounded embodied responses. Future work will focus on larger-scale user studies and deeper exploration of socially grounded multi-agent interaction dynamics.