Microsoft Researchers Are Using ChatGPT to Control Robots, Drones
ChatGPT is best known as an AI program capable of writing essays and answering questions, but now Microsoft is using the chatbot to control robots.
On Monday, the company’s researchers published(Opens in a new window) a paper on how ChatGPT can streamline the process of programming software commands to control various robots, such as mechanical arms and drones.
“We still rely heavily on hand-written code to control robots,” the researchers wrote. Microsoft’s approach, on the other hand, taps ChatGPT to write some of the computer code.
ChatGPT can do this because the AI model was trained on huge libraries of human text—including the code for software programs. ChatGPT has already shown it can write and debug programs in various languages based on text-based requests. So Microsoft’s researchers decided to see if they could apply the same capabilities to write code for robotics hardware.
“It turns out that ChatGPT can do a lot by itself, but it still needs some help,” the researchers wrote. To help ChatGPT write the computer code, the researchers first outlined to the AI program the various commands it could use to control a given robot.
“We write a text prompt for ChatGPT which describes the task goal while also explicitly stating which functions from the high-level library are available. The prompt can also contain information about task constraints, or how ChatGPT should form its answers,” the researchers added.
The team applied the approach to several demos, one of which included using ChatGPT to write computer code to control an aerial drone. Microsoft researchers first fed(Opens in a new window) the AI chatbot a rather long prompt laying out the computer commands it could write to control the drone. After that,
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