REBEL: Rule-based and Experience-enhanced Learning with LLMs for Initial Task Allocation in Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teaming

Abstract

Multi-human multi-robot teams are increasingly recognized for their efficiency in executing large-scale, complex tasks by integrating heterogeneous yet potentially synergistic humans and robots. However, this inherent heterogeneity presents significant challenges in teaming, necessitating efficient initial task allocation (ITA) strategies that optimally form complementary human-robot pairs or collaborative chains and establish well-matched task distributions. While current learning-based methods demonstrate promising performance, they often incur high computational costs and lack the flexibility to incorporate user preferences in multi-objective optimization (MOO) or adapt to last-minute changes in dynamic real-world environments. To address these limitations, we propose REBEL, an LLM-based ITA framework that integrates rule-based and experience-enhanced learning to enhance LLM reasoning capabilities and improve in-context adaptability to MOO and situational changes. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of REBEL in both single-objective and multi-objective scenarios, demonstrating superior alignment with user preferences and enhanced situational awareness to handle unexpected team composition changes. Additionally, we show that REBEL can complement pre-trained ITA policies, further boosting situational adaptability and overall team performance. Website at https://sites.google.com/view/ita-rebel .