How to Prompt Your Robot: A PromptBook for Manipulation Skills with Code as Policies

Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Ted Xiao, Sumeet Singh, Vidhi Jain, Allen Z. Ren, Quan Vuong, Jake Varley, Alexander Herzog, Isabel Leal, Sean Kirmani, Mario Prats, Dorsa Sadigh, Vikas Sindhwani, Kanishka Rao, Jacky Liang, Andy Zeng

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform semantic reasoning, planning and write code for robotics tasks. However, most methods rely on pre-existing primitives (i.e. pick, open drawer) or similar examples of robot code alone, which heavily limits their scalability to new scenarios. We present PromptBook, a collection of different prompting paradigms to generate code for successfully executing new manipulation skills. We demonstrate example-based, instruction-based and chain-of-thought to write robot code; as well as a method to build the prompt leveraging LLMs and human feedback. We show PromptBook enables LLMs to write code for new low-level manipulation skills in a zero-shot manner: from picking diverse objects, opening/closing drawers, to whisking, and waving hello. We evaluate the new skills on a mobile manipulator with 83% success rate at picking, 50-71% at opening drawers and 100% at closing them. Notably, the LLM is able to infer gripper orientation for grasping a drawer handle (z-axis aligned) vs. a top-down grasp (x-axis aligned).