SkillComposer: Learning Reusable Skills for Natural-Language Robot Programming

Abstract:Natural-language interfaces can lower the barrier to programming robots, but existing systems struggle when users request complex tasks. While large language models (LLMs) perform well with simple commands, they often struggle to generate code for multi-step tasks, decompose high-level instructions, or reuse prior solutions. We present SkillComposer, an interactive natural-language robot programming system for simulation environments that continually learns reusable program abstractions. SkillComposer uses a generate-test architecture in which an LLM iteratively generates and revises robot programs before execution. Successful programs are stored and processed by an online library-learning algorithm that compresses recurring function sequences into reusable macro skills for future tasks. We evaluate SkillComposer through ablation experiments and a user study with 12 participants to determine its effectiveness on manipulation and robot caregiving tasks. The results show that evaluator-guided generation and learned abstractions improve success rates and usability while reducing user effort in natural-language robot programming.

8 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to IEEE Humanoids 2026

Robotics (cs.RO); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.14944 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.14944v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14944 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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