Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning

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This field studies how robots can use large language models to interpret instructions, reason about their surroundings, and plan tasks such as navigation, manipulation, and team coordination. Common approaches combine language or vision-language models with symbolic methods such as PDDL, behavior trees, scene graphs, and temporal logic, then use robot controllers to carry out the resulting plans. Systems also use visual feedback, memory, verification, and replanning to respond to changing environments and execution failures. A central challenge is making plans reliably feasible and safe in the physical world while keeping reasoning fast and affordable.

Latest papers

236 papers48 papers in the last four weeks, up 78% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

May 25, 2026

G-DRAGON: Geospatial Reasoning and Dynamic Planning for Retrieval-Augmented Outdoor Navigation

Autonomous ground robots operating in large-scale outdoor environments require both robust long-range navigation and fine-grained ''last-mile'' exploration. Current advances in visual-language navigation (VLN) work well at short-range tasks, lacking geospatial grounding for long-distance missions. Some OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based methods relying on cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to factual hallucination and cannot conduct ''last-mile'' exploration based on human instruction. To address these challenges, we present G-DRAGON, a retrieval-augmented framework for outdoor, open-world navigation. This framework maps natural-language commands to versioned, local OSM entities via generative retrieval based on lightweight LLM, yielding accurate coordinates for global route planning. A high-level planning module bridges global topological routes with the SLAM system, projecting geospatial waypoints into the robot's navigable frame. For the ''last mile," the framework transitions to frontier-based exploration and open-set semantic voxel mapping to localize open-vocabulary targets. Experimental results in simulation demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we validate the system in unseen real-world urban environments on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), successfully completing person-search missions with trajectories of up to 500m.

Dongzhihan Wang, Yi Du, Jianan Sun +5

School of Future Technology, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China

Off-Road Robot Navigation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Navigation Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation Frontier-Based Exploration

May 20, 2026

Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Active Spatial Brain and Generalizable Action Cerebellum

In this paper, we explore spatial-aware humanoid whole-body manipulation task. Compared with tabletop settings, this task poses two key challenges: 1) Spatial understanding is challenging in complex 3D environments with diverse spatial relations. 2) Action generation is difficult to generalize, as limited and costly real-robot data restricts data-driven models generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation framework that leverages the spatial perception and action generation capabilities of multi-agent large models. Specifically, our framework includes two components: Active Spatial Brain for active spatial perception and decision-making, and Generalizable Action Cerebellum for executable robot action generation. The first component actively perceives the spatial scene and makes decisions on task planning and subtask decomposition. The second component generate executable robot actions based on the decisions made by the first module without needs of task-specific real robot data. To benchmark our framework, we design a set of spatial manipulation tasks from two perspectives: evaluating spatial perception and understanding, and assessing real-robot task performance. The results demonstrate strong performance on both aspects across diverse tasks and environments.

Zhizhao Liang, Yi-Lin Wei, Xuhang Chen +6

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, China · Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, China

Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning 3D Spatial Reasoning Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Whole-Body Robotic Manipulation Robot Motion Generation+2

May 19, 2026

The Yes-Man Syndrome: Benchmarking Abstention in Embodied Robotic Agents

Vision-language models (VLMs) are used as high-level planners for embodied agents, translating natural language instructions and visual observations into action plans. While prior work has studied abstention in LLMs, existing benchmarks are largely text-only and do not capture the perceptual grounding and physical constraints inherent to embodied robotics environments. In such settings, abstention requires recognizing when instructions are ambiguous, physically infeasible, based on false premises, or otherwise unresolvable given the available sensory modalities and context. To address this gap, we introduce a taxonomy to categorize abstention in the context of embodied robotics and present RoboAbstention, a scalable and auditable framework for generating abstention instructions grounded in images gathered from five robotics datasets. RoboAbstention instantiates the taxonomy through a three-phase pipeline: (1) structured visual grounding, (2) deterministic constraint derivation, and (3) controlled instruction generation via category-specific templates. This enables the construction of a diverse dataset with verifiable abstention conditions. We evaluate several frontier VLMs and find that all models exhibit significant weaknesses in abstention, including those with advanced reasoning capabilities. The best-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, abstains on only 39.0% of our 6,069 benchmark instructions, while the embodied planner Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 Preview abstains on just 16.5%. We further explore methods for improving abstention in VLM planners, such as defensive prompting and in-context learning, and find that these interventions substantially improve performance, reaching 93.6% abstention rate for Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 Preview and 88.6% for GPT 5.4 Mini, yet no approach fully solves the problem. We open-source RoboAbstention at https://purseclab.github.io/RoboAbstention/.

Doguhan Yeke, Elif Su Temirel, Ananth Shreekumar +3

Purdue University · Bilkent University · Work performed while an intern at Purdue University.

VLM Robustness Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI VLMs for Robotics

May 19, 2026

Probing an Embodied LLM: When Higher Observation Fidelity Hurts Problem Solving

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as cognitive components for robotic systems, yet their opaque decision processes make it difficult to explain success or failure in closed-loop embodied tasks. Following an empirical AI methodology, we study an embodied LLM agent behaviorally by varying the available information and measuring the resulting changes in behavior. Using the Lockbox, a sequential mechanical puzzle with hidden interdependencies, we evaluate LLMs across RGB, RGB-D, and ground-truth symbolic observations in a physical robotic setup and use simulation to probe the resulting behavior. Counterintuitively, agents perform best under raw RGB input and worst under perfect ground-truth observations. In simulation, we probe this effect by randomly flipping perceived action outcomes and find that moderate noise improves performance, peaking at a 40% flip probability with a 2.85-fold success rate increase over the noise-free baseline. Further analysis links this gain to a reduction in repetitive action loops. These findings suggest that success rates alone are insufficient for evaluating LLMs, as measured performance may reflect the interaction between perceptual errors and reasoning failures rather than robust problem solving.

Oussama Zenkri, Oliver Brock

Robotics and Biology Laboratory, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany · Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin, Germany · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Agent Evaluation Embodied AI Robotic Perception LLM Agent Reliability Embodied Reasoning

May 16, 2026

NORM-Nav: Zero-Shot Mobile Robot Navigation with Natural Language Behavioral Constraints

Mobile robots operating in human-centered environments must generate not only collision-free paths but also trajectories that follow local behavioral conventions. Conventional costmap-based navigation emphasizes geometric feasibility and often overlooks such requirements, which can result in socially inappropriate behaviors. This paper presents NORM-Nav, a zero-shot framework that integrates natural language behavioral constraints into costmap-based planning. An LLM parses each instruction into structured constraints and grounds them using real-time vision--LiDAR perception. These constraints are encoded as multi-layer costmaps that represent geometric, semantic, directional, and velocity cues and are directly compatible with standard grid-based planners. Simulation and real-world experiments indicate that NORM-Nav improves task success rates and produces trajectories closer to human references than representative baselines. The project website is available at https://ei-nav.github.io/NORM-Nav.

Dongjie Huo, Junhui Wang, Chao Gao +3

College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University · Institute of Systems Engineering and Collaborative Laboratory for Intelligent Science and Systems, Macau University of Science and Technology +1

Language-Conditioned Robot Planning Trajectory Generation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Constrained Motion Planning Social Robot Navigation Language-Conditioned Robot Control+2

May 15, 2026

Propagating Unsafe Actions in LLM Controlled Multi-Robot Collaboration via Single Robot Compromise

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as general planners in embodied intelligence, enabling high level coordination and low level task planning for both single robot and multi-robot collaboration. This increasing reliance on embodied LLM planners also raises critical security concerns, since misaligned or manipulated instructions can be translated into physical actions. Prior work has studied such threats in single robot settings, while security risks in LLM controlled multi-robot collaboration, especially those propagated through inter robot communication, remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel attack paradigm for multi-robot system in which the adversary interacts with only a single entry robot. The compromised robot then propagates malicious intent through peer communication, leading to coordinated unsafe actions across the system. Our evaluation, covering high risk dimensions of dereliction of duty, privacy compromise, and public safety hazards, reveals a persistent safety alignment gap in multi-robot planners. We quantify this process with three metrics, obedience, infectiousness, and stealthiness. Experiments demonstrate both persistent attacker control and rapid propagation: obedience reaches 1.00 in the strongest cases, and infectiousness rises to 0.90. Notably, the attack is highly efficient, requiring as few as 3.0 rounds to compromise all the robots while maintaining a stealthiness score of 0.81. Such risks are amplified when robots must resolve trade offs in critical situations, such as emergencies or conflicts of rights, because the coordination mechanism can unintentionally allow adversarial instructions to override safety requirements. The code is available at https://github.com/TheFatInsect/InfectBot.

Zhen Huang, Zhihuang Liu, Mengxuan Luo +2

College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Adversarial Attacks on LLMs LLM Safety Alignment Multi-Robot Coordination Robot Safety Multi-Agent System Security

May 15, 2026

Hybrid LLM-based Intelligent Framework for Robot Task Scheduling

This study introduces intelligent frameworks that use Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve task scheduling for construction robots. The LLM is fed with key data about the desired task, such as agent action abilities, and the desired end goal to be achieved. A well-balanced allocation strategy is developed, optimizing both time efficiency and resource utilization. Our system utilizes a Natural Language Processing interface to streamline communication with construction professionals and adapt in real-time to unexpected site conditions. We concurrently use two LLM agents, specifically generator (GPT-4) and supervisor (Gemma 3/Llama 4/Mistral 7b) LLM agents to provide a more precise task schedule. We evaluate the proposed methodology using a straightforward scenario and provide metric scores to prove the efficacy of the frameworks. Our results highlight that the implementation of LLMs is crucial in construction operational tasks including robots.

Swayamjit Saha, Subhabrata Das, Haonan Duan +1

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA · 2Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA · 3Consumer and Community Banking, JPMorgan Chase, New York, NY, USA +2

Robotic Construction Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Agent Orchestration Robotics

May 13, 2026

LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration

Traditional autonomous UAV search missions rely on geometric coverage patterns that ignore the semantic context of the target, leading to significant time waste in large-scale environments. In this paper we present LMPath, a pipeline for generating language-mediated exploration priors for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) search missions that leverages semantics. Given a basic geofence and an object of interest prompt, LMPath uses generative language models to determine what regions of the environment should contain that object and a foundation vision model ran over satellite imagery to segment sub-regions that form the exploration prior. This prior can then be used to generate UAV paths with various objectives, such as minimizing the expected time to locate the object of interest, maximizing the probability that the object is found given a limited travel distance, or narrowing down the search space to sub-regions that are most likely to contain the object. To demonstrate it's capabilities, we used LMPath to generate various UAV paths and ran them using a real UAV over large-scale environments. We also ran simulations to demonstrate how paths generated using LMPath outperform traditional path planning approaches for search missions.

Jonathan A. Diller, Fernando Cladera, Camillo J. Taylor +1

GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania

Trajectory Generation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning UAV Navigation Robot Motion Planning

May 11, 2026

Plan in Sandbox, Navigate in Open Worlds: Learning Physics-Grounded Abstracted Experience for Embodied Navigation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional general reasoning capabilities. However, their performance in embodied navigation remains hindered by a scarcity of aligned open-world vision and robot control data. Despite simulators providing a cost-effective alternative for data collection, the inherent reliance on photorealistic simulations often limits the transferability of learned policies. To this end, we propose Sandbox-Abstracted Grounded Experience (SAGE), a framework that enables agents to learn within a physics-grounded semantic abstraction rather than a photorealistic simulation, mimicking the human capacity for mental simulation where plans are rehearsed in simplified physics abstractions before execution. SAGE system operates via three synergistic phases: (1) Genesis: constructing diverse, physics-constrained semantic environments to bootstrap experience; (2) Evolution: distilling experiences through Reinforcement Learning (RL), utilizing a novel asymmetric adaptive clipping mechanism to stabilize updates; (3) Navigation: bridging the abstract policy to open-world control. We demonstrate that SAGE significantly improves planner-assisted embodied navigation, achieving a 53.21% LLM-Match Success Rate on A-EQA (+9.7% over baseline), while showing encouraging transfer to physical indoor robot deployment.

Zhixuan Shen, Jiawei Du, Ziyu Guo +5

School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, China · Centre for Frontier AI Research, A*STAR, Singapore · School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, UK

RL for Robotics Embodied Navigation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robotics Simulation Sim-to-Real Transfer

May 10, 2026

LASSA Architecture-Based Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) operate persistently in communication-constrained environments, thus requiring high-level autonomous fault-tolerant control under faulty operating conditions. Existing approaches rely heavily on predefined hard-coded rules and struggle to achieve effective fault-tolerant control against unforeseen faults. Although large language models (LLMs) possess powerful cognitive and reasoning capabilities, their inherent hallucinations remain a major obstacle to their application in UUV control systems. This paper proposes an intelligent control method based on the LASSA (LLM-based Agent with Solver, Sensor and Actuator) architecture. Within this architecture, an LLM identifies unknown faults and accomplishes task replanning via autonomous reasoning without hard-coded rules; the intelligent agent undertakes perception, scheduling and decision evaluation; the solver verifies physical boundary feasibility constraints prior to command transmission to the actuators. This architecture suppresses physically infeasible LLM hallucinations and ensures interpretable, verifiable decision-making. Moreover, it enables fast-slow dual closed-loop collaborative control, where the slow loop undertakes high-level dynamic decision-making and the fast loop guarantees high-frequency real-time control, simultaneously balancing decision intelligence and control timeliness. Lake experiments under normal and lower-rudder-fault conditions show that the framework detects trajectory tracking abnormalities, replans the route by adjusting the turning radius from 4m to 12m and reducing speed from 2kn to 1kn, passes all three solver constraints on the first invocation, and guides the UUV to complete the full mission; under normal conditions no false fault alarms are raised throughout the run.

Hong Chen, Zixiang Tang, Yuanbao Chen +1

Wuhan Second Ship Design and Research Institute, Wuhan, 430060, China · School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

Language Model-Based Control Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Underwater Robotics

May 10, 2026

NEXUS: Learning Safety Constraints and Action Models for Safe and Robust Embodied Planning

Large language models (LLMs) enable embodied agents to plan from naturallanguage instructions, yet their actions may be physically infeasible or hazardous. Existing neuro-symbolic learners primarily refine execution models, while formal safety methods acquire or enforce safety constraints. This separation limits the reuse of both execution corrections and safety knowledge across tasks. We present NEXUS, a modular neuro-symbolic framework that jointly maintains a PDDL domain model and an LTL safety specification. Execution failures are used to repair action schemas, whereas detected hazards are converted into reusable LTL constraints through hierarchical semantic and translation sampling with equivalence consensus. Accumulated constraints are enforced through LTL progression during symbolic search; comparing constrained and unconstrained search outcomes distinguishes physical unreachability from safety-induced refusal. Experiments on SafeAgentBench evaluation set show that NEXUS achieves the best overall trade-off between safetask completion and unsafe-task refusal, while maintaining low violation rates under jailbreak attacks. Ablations confirm the complementary benefits of PDDLdomain refinement and LTL-constraint accumulation.

Tiehan Cui, Peipei Liu, Yanxu Mao +3

School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China · School of Software, Henan University, China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China +2

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Agent Safety

May 8, 2026

Hierarchical Prompting with Dual LLM Modules for Robotic Task and Motion Planning

We present a hierarchical language-driven framework for robotic task and motion planning to improve natural, intuitive human-robot interaction in service and assistance scenarios. The proposed system employs two large language model (LLM) modules: a high-level planning agent and a low-level spatial reasoning sub-module. The primary agent processes natural language commands and generates action sequences using a ReAct-style prompt, interacting with tools for object perception and manipulation (e.g., pick, place, release). For precise spatial placement, such as interpreting "place the mug next to the plate", a separate sub-prompting module handles 3D reasoning based on object geometry and scene layout. The system integrates YOLOX-GDRNet for object detection and pose estimation, along with a motion execution stub. We evaluated the system in 24 test scenarios, ranging from simple spatial commands to high-level instructions and infeasible requests. The system achieved an overall task success rate of 86%.

Karolina Źróbek, Tessa Pulli, Paweł Gajewski +2

IBM, Krakow, Poland · TU Wien, Vienna, Austria · Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland +1

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Prompting Human-Robot Interaction Robot Motion Planning

May 8, 2026

Melding LLM and temporal logic for reliable human-swarm collaboration in complex scenarios

Robot swarms promise scalable assistance in complex and hazardous environments. Task planning lies at the core of human-swarm collaboration, translating the operator's intent into coordinated swarm actions and helping determine when validation or intervention is required during execution. In long-horizon missions under dynamic scenarios, however, reliable task planning becomes difficult to maintain: emerging events and changing conditions demand continual adaptation, and sustained operator oversight imposes substantial cognitive burden. Existing LLM-based planning tools can support plan generation, yet they remain susceptible to invalid task orderings and infeasible robot actions, resulting in frequent manual adjustment. Here we introduce a neuro-symbolic framework for long-horizon human-swarm collaboration that tightly melds verifiable task planning with context-grounded LLM reasoning. We formalize mission goals and operational rules as temporal logic formulas and admissible task orderings as task automata. Conditioned on these formal constraints and live perceptual context, LLMs generate executable subtask sequences that satisfy mission rules and remain grounded in the current scene. An uncertainty-aware scheduler then assigns subtasks across the heterogeneous swarm to maximize parallelisms while remaining resilient to disruptions. An event-triggered interaction protocol further limits operator involvement to sparse, high-level confirmation and guidance. Deployment on a heterogeneous robotic fleet yields similar results while remaining robust to hardware-specific actuation and communication uncertainties. Together, these results support a formal and scalable paradigm for reliable and low-overhead human-swarm collaboration in dynamic environments

Junfeng Chen, Yuxiao Zhu, An Zhuo +6

School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University, Beĳing & 100871, China. · 2Division of Natural and Applied Sciences, Duke Kunshan University, Suzhou & 215316, China. · School of Automaton, Southeast University, Nanjing & 210096, China. +1

Swarm Robotics Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Neuro-Symbolic Planning Robot Task Planning Multi-Robot Task Allocation Neuro-Symbolic AI

May 8, 2026

CommandSwarm: Safety-Aware Natural Language-to-Behavior-Tree Generation for Robotic Swarms

Natural-language interfaces can make swarm robotics more accessible to non-expert operators, but they must translate ambiguous user intent into executable swarm behaviors without unsupported actions, malformed programs, or unsafe plans. This paper presents CommandSwarm, a safety-aware language-to-behavior-tree pipeline for generating XML behavior trees (BTs) from speech or text commands. The system combines multilingual translation, command-level safety filtering, constrained prompting, a LoRA-adapted large language model (LLM), and deterministic parser validation against a whitelist of executable swarm primitives. We evaluate eleven open 6.7B--14B parameter LLMs, all using 4-bit quantization, on representative swarm-control scenarios under zero-shot, one-shot, and two-shot prompting. Falcon3-Instruct-10B and Mistral-7B-v3 are the strongest prompt-engineered candidates, reaching BLEU scores above 0.60 and high syntactic validity in few-shot settings. LoRA adaptation of Falcon3-Instruct-10B on a 2,063-example synthetic instruction--BT corpus improves zero-shot BLEU from 0.267 to 0.663, ROUGE-L from 0.366 to 0.692, and parser-accepted syntactic validity from 0% to 72%. Translation experiments further show that SeamlessM4T v2-large and EuroLLM-9B provide the best quality-latency trade-offs for the multilingual front end. The results indicate that compact, quantized, domain-adapted LLMs can generate useful swarm BTs when embedded in a validated systems pipeline. They also show that parser acceptance and safety filtering remain necessary execution gates; generation quality alone is not sufficient for autonomous deployment.

Mohammed Majid, Amjad Yousef Majid

Multi-Robot Systems Swarm Robotics Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Safety Behavior Trees

May 4, 2026

CoRAL: Contact-Rich Adaptive LLM-based Control for Robotic Manipulation

While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in high-level reasoning and semantic understanding, applying them directly to contact-rich manipulation remains a challenge due to their lack of explicit physical grounding and inability to perform adaptive control. To bridge this gap, we propose CoRAL (Contact-Rich Adaptive LLM-based control), a modular framework that enables zero-shot planning by decoupling high-level reasoning from low-level control. Unlike black-box policies, CoRAL uses LLMs not as direct controllers, but as cost designers that synthesize context-aware objective functions for a sampling-based motion planner (MPPI). To address the ambiguity of physical parameters in visual data, we introduce a neuro-symbolic adaptation loop: a VLM provides semantic priors for environmental dynamics, such as mass and friction estimates, which are then explicitly refined in real time via online system identification, while the LLM iteratively modulates the cost-function structure to correct strategic errors based on interaction feedback. Furthermore, a retrieval-based memory unit allows the system to reuse successful strategies across recurrent tasks. This hierarchical architecture ensures real-time control stability by decoupling high-level semantic reasoning from reactive execution, effectively bridging the gap between slow LLM inference and dynamic contact requirements. We validate CoRAL on both simulation and real-world hardware across challenging and novel tasks, such as flipping objects against walls by leveraging extrinsic contacts. Experiments demonstrate that CoRAL outperforms state-of-the-art VLA and foundation-model-based planner baselines by boosting success rates over 50% on average in unseen contact-rich scenarios, effectively handling sim-to-real gaps through its adaptive physical understanding.

Berk Çiçek, Mert K. Er, Ozgur S. Oguz

LiRA Lab, Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Türkiye

Language Model-Based Control Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation VLMs for Robotics

May 3, 2026

TrajRAG: Retrieving Geometric-Semantic Experience for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Existing zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) methods often exploit commonsense knowledge from large language or vision-language models to guide navigation. However, such knowledge arises from internet-scale text rather than embodied 3D experience, and episodic observations collected during navigation are typically discarded, preventing the accumulation of lifelong experience. To this end, we propose Trajectory RAG (TrajRAG), a retrieval-augmented generation framework that enhances large-model reasoning by retrieving geometric-semantic experiences. TrajRAG incrementally accumulates episodic observations from past navigation episodes. To structure these observations, we propose a topological-polar (topo-polar) trajectory representation that compactly encodes spatial layouts and semantic contexts, effectively removing redundancies in raw episodic observations. A hierarchical chunking structure further organizes similar topo-polar trajectories into unified summaries, enabling coarse-to-fine retrieval. During navigation, candidate frontiers generate multiple trajectory hypotheses that query TrajRAG for similar past trajectories, guiding large-model reasoning for waypoint selection. New experiences are continually consolidated into TrajRAG, enabling the accumulation of lifelong navigation experience. Experiments on MP3D, HM3D-v1, and HM3D-v2 show that TrajRAG effectively retrieves relevant geometric-semantic experiences and improves zero-shot ObjectNav performance.

Yiyao Wang, Sixian Zhang, Keming Zhang +3

State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing · Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing

Embodied Navigation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Navigation Object-Goal Navigation

May 2, 2026

Assistance Without Interruption: A Benchmark and LLM-based Framework for Non-Intrusive Human-Robot Assistance

Human-robot interaction (HRI) has long studied how agents and people coordinate to achieve shared goals. In this work, we formalize and benchmark the non-intrusive assistance as an independent paradigm of HRI, where a robot proactively supports a human's ongoing multi-step activities while strictly avoiding interruptions. Unlike conventional HRI tasks that rely on direct commands, explicit negotiation, or proactive interventions based on user habits and history, our task treats the human's plan as the primary process and formulates assistance as a joint decision over when to act and what to do. To systematically evaluate this problem, we establish a simulation benchmark, NIABench, along with new metrics tailored to the non-intrusive assistance task. We further propose a hybrid architecture that integrates an LLM with a scoring model. The scoring model first applies semantic retrieval to prune large candidate action sets, and then a ranker evaluates human-step and robot-action pairs, enabling reasoning over timing and cross-step dependencies. Comprehensive experiments on both NIABench and real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method achieves proactive, non-intrusive assistance that reduces human effort while preserving task effectiveness.

Yuedi Zhang, Shuanghao Bai, Wanqi Zhou +4

Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · School of Electrical Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, China

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Proactive Assistance Human-Robot Collaboration Human-Robot Interaction

Apr 29, 2026

From Prompt to Physical Actuation: Holistic Threat Modeling of LLM-Enabled Robotic Systems

As large language models are integrated into autonomous robotic systems for task planning and control, compromised inputs or unsafe model outputs can propagate through the planning pipeline to physical-world consequences. Although prior work has studied robotic cybersecurity, adversarial perception attacks, and LLM safety independently, no existing study traces how these threat categories interact and propagate across trust boundaries in a unified architectural model. We address this gap by modeling an LLM-enabled autonomous robot in an edge-cloud architecture as a hierarchical Data Flow Diagram and applying STRIDE-per-interaction analysis across six boundary-crossing interaction points using a three-category taxonomy of Conventional Cyber Threats, Adversarial Threats, and Conversational Threats. The analysis reveals that these categories converge at the same boundary crossings, and we trace three cross-boundary attack chains from external entry points to unsafe physical actuation, each exposing a distinct architectural property: the absence of independent semantic validation between user input and actuator dispatch, cross-modal translation from visual perception to language-model instruction, and unmediated boundary crossing through provider-side tool use. To our knowledge, this is the first DFD-based threat analysis integrating all three threat categories across the full perception-planning-actuation pipeline of an LLM-enabled robotic system.

Neha Nagaraja, Hayretdin Bahsi, Carlo R. da Cunha

School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA · Department of Software Science, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Cybersecurity LLM Security

Apr 29, 2026

LLM-Flax : Generalizable Robotic Task Planning via Neuro-Symbolic Approaches with Large Language Models

Deploying a neuro-symbolic task planner on a new domain today requires significant manual effort: a domain expert must author relaxation and complementary rules, and hundreds of training problems must be solved to supervise a Graph Neural Network (GNN) object scorer. We propose LLM-Flax, a three-stage framework that eliminates all three sources of manual effort using a locally hosted LLM given only a PDDL domain file. Stage 1 automatically generates relaxation and complementary rules via structured prompting with format validation and self-correction. Stage 2 introduces LLM-guided failure recovery with a feasibility-gated budget policy that explicitly reserves API latency cost before each LLM call, preventing the downstream relaxation fallback from being starved. Stage 3 replaces the domain-trained GNN entirely with zero-shot LLM object importance scoring, requiring no training data. We evaluate all three stages on the MazeNamo benchmark across 10x10, 12x12, and 15x15 grids (8 benchmarks total). LLM-Flax achieves average SR 0.945 versus the manual baseline's 0.828 (+0.117), matching or outperforming manual rules on every one of the eight benchmarks. On 12x12 Expert, LLM-Flax attains SR 0.733 where the manual planner fails entirely (SR 0.000); on 15x15 Hard, it achieves SR 1.000 versus Manual's 0.900. Stage 3 demonstrates feasibility (SR 0.720 on 12x12 Hard with no training data) but faces a context-window bottleneck at scale, pointing to the primary open challenge for future work.

Seongmin Kim, Daegyu Lee

Department of Physical AI Engineering, Jeonbuk National University(JBNU) · Faculty of Department of Advanced Defense Technology and Industry, Jeonbuk National University(JBNU)

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Symbolic Planning Symbolic Reasoning Robot Task Planning Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Neuro-Symbolic Planning

Apr 21, 2026

SafetyALFRED: Evaluating Safety-Conscious Planning of Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models are increasingly adopted as autonomous agents in interactive environments, yet their ability to proactively address safety hazards remains insufficient. We introduce SafetyALFRED, built upon the embodied agent benchmark ALFRED, augmented with six categories of real-world kitchen hazards. While existing safety evaluations focus on hazard recognition through disembodied question answering (QA) settings, we evaluate eleven state-of-the-art models from the Qwen, Gemma, and Gemini families on not only hazard recognition, but also active risk mitigation through embodied planning. Our experimental results reveal a significant alignment gap: while models can accurately recognize hazards in QA settings, average mitigation success rates for these hazards are low in comparison. Our findings demonstrate that static evaluations through QA are insufficient for physical safety, thus we advocate for a paradigm shift toward benchmarks that prioritize corrective actions in embodied contexts. We open-source our code and dataset under https://github.com/sled-group/SafetyALFRED.git

Josue Torres-Fonseca, Naihao Deng, Yinpei Dai +5

University of Michigan · Boise State University

Safety Evaluation of VLA Models LLM Safety Benchmarks Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning AI Agent Safety AI Agent Benchmarks Robot Safety+5

Apr 20, 2026

Using large language models for embodied planning introduces systematic safety risks

Large language models are increasingly used as planners for robotic systems, yet how safely they plan remains an open question. To evaluate safe planning systematically, we introduce DESPITE, a benchmark of 12,279 tasks spanning physical and normative dangers with fully deterministic validation. Across 23 models, even near-perfect planning ability does not ensure safety: the best-planning model fails to produce a valid plan on only 0.4% of tasks but produces dangerous plans on 28.3%. Among 18 open-source models from 3B to 671B parameters, planning ability improves substantially with scale (0.4-99.3%) while safety awareness remains relatively flat (38-57%). We identify a multiplicative relationship between these two capacities, showing that larger models complete more tasks safely primarily through improved planning, not through better danger avoidance. Three proprietary reasoning models reach notably higher safety awareness (71-81%), while non-reasoning proprietary models and open-source reasoning models remain below 57%. As planning ability approaches saturation for frontier models, improving safety awareness becomes a central challenge for deploying language-model planners in robotic systems.

Tao Zhang, Kaixian Qu, Zhibin Li +4

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. · University College London, London, United Kingdom. · Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States. +2

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Safety Robot Task Planning LLM Safety Evaluation

Apr 17, 2026

Semantic Area Graph Reasoning for Multi-Robot Language-Guided Search

Coordinating multi-robot systems (MRS) to search in unknown environments is particularly challenging for tasks that require semantic reasoning beyond geometric exploration. Classical coordination strategies rely on frontier coverage or information gain and cannot incorporate high-level task intent, such as searching for objects associated with specific room types. We propose Semantic Area Graph Reasoning (SAGR), a hierarchical framework that enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to coordinate multi-robot exploration and semantic search through a structured semantic-topological abstraction of the environment. SAGR incrementally constructs a semantic area graph from a semantic occupancy map, encoding room instances, connectivity, frontier availability, and robot states into a compact task-relevant representation for LLM reasoning. The LLM performs high-level semantic room assignment based on spatial structure and task context, while deterministic frontier planning and local navigation handle geometric execution within assigned rooms. Experiments on the Habitat-Matterport3D dataset across 100 scenarios show that SAGR remains competitive with state-of-the-art exploration methods while consistently improving semantic target search efficiency, with up to 18.8% in large environments. These results highlight the value of structured semantic abstractions as an effective interface between LLM-based reasoning and multi-robot coordination in complex indoor environments.

Ruiyang Wang, Hao-Lun Hsu, Jiwoo Kim +1

Multi-Robot Systems Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Multi-Robot Exploration Multi-Robot Coordination

Apr 16, 2026

Foundation Models in Robotics: A Comprehensive Review of Methods, Models, Datasets, Challenges and Future Research Directions

Over the recent years, the field of robotics has been undergoing a transformative paradigm shift from fixed, single-task, domain-specific solutions towards adaptive, multi-function, general-purpose agents, capable of operating in complex, open-world, and dynamic environments. This tremendous advancement is primarily driven by the emergence of Foundation Models (FMs), i.e., large-scale neural-network architectures trained on massive, heterogeneous datasets that provide unprecedented capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, long-horizon planning, and cross-embodiment generalization. In this context, the current study provides a holistic, systematic, and in-depth review of the research landscape of FMs in robotics. In particular, the evolution of the field is initially delineated through five distinct research phases, spanning from the early incorporation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) models to the current frontier of multi-sensory generalization and real-world deployment. Subsequently, a highly-granular taxonomic investigation of the literature is performed, examining the following key aspects: a) the employed FM types, including LLMs, VFMs, VLMs, and VLAs, b) the underlying neural-network architectures, c) the adopted learning paradigms, d) the different learning stages of knowledge incorporation, e) the major robotic tasks, and f) the main real-world application domains. For each aspect, comparative analysis and critical insights are provided. Moreover, a report on the publicly available datasets used for model training and evaluation across the considered robotic tasks is included. Furthermore, a hierarchical discussion on the current open challenges and promising future research directions in the field is incorporated.

Aggelos Psiris, Vasileios Argyriou, Evangelos K. Markakis +4

Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Department of Networks and Digital Media, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Heraklion, Greece +4

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Foundation Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Vision-Language-Action Models Multimodal Foundation Models VLMs for Robotics

Apr 7, 2026

Automating Manual Tasks through Intuitive Robot Programming and Cognitive Robotics

This paper presents a novel concept for intuitive end-user programming of robots, inspired by natural interaction between humans. Natural language and supportive gestures are translated into robot programs using large language models (LLMs) and computer vision (CV). Through equally natural system feedback in the form of clarification questions and visual representations, the generated program can be reviewed and adjusted, thereby ensuring safety, transparency, and user acceptance.

Bijan Kavousian, Petar Tesic, Oliver Petrovic +1

Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University, Steinbachstraße 19, D-52074 Aachen

Robotics Human-Robot Interaction Language-Conditioned Robot Control Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning

Apr 7, 2026

Pre-Execution Safety Gate & Task Safety Contracts for LLM-Controlled Robot Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to convert task commands into robot-executable code, however this pipeline lacks validation gates to detect unsafe and defective commands before they are translated into robot code. Furthermore, even commands that appear safe at the outset can produce unsafe state transitions during execution in the absence of continuous constraint monitoring. In this research, we introduce SafeGate, a neurosymbolic safety architecture that prevents unsafe natural language task commands from reaching robot execution. Drawing from ISO 13482 safety standard, SafeGate extracts structured safety-relevant properties from natural language commands and applies a deterministic decision gate to authorize or reject execution. In addition, we introduce Task Safety Contracts, which decomposes commands that pass through the gate into invariants, guards, and abort conditions to prevent unsafe state transitions during execution. We further incorporate Z3 SMT solving to enforce constraint checking derived from the Task Safety Contracts. We evaluate SafeGate against existing LLM-based robot safety frameworks and baseline LLMs across 230 benchmark tasks, 30 AI2-THOR simulation scenarios, and real-world robot experiments. Results show that SafeGate significantly reduces the acceptance of defective commands while maintaining a high acceptance of benign tasks, demonstrating the importance of pre-execution safety gates for LLM-controlled robot systems

Ike Obi, Vishnunandan L. N. Venkatesh, Weizheng Wang +5

Robot Safety LLM Guardrails Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Runtime Verification

Apr 1, 2026

StretchBot: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Adaptive Guidance with Assistive Robots

Assistive robots have growing potential to support physical wellbeing in home and healthcare settings, for example, by guiding users through stretching or rehabilitation routines. However, existing systems remain largely scripted, which limits their ability to adapt to user state, environmental context, and interaction dynamics. In this work, we present StretchBot, a hybrid neuro-symbolic robotic coach for adaptive assistive guidance. The system combines multimodal perception with knowledge-graph-grounded large language model reasoning to support context-aware adjustments during short stretching sessions while maintaining a structured routine. To complement the system description, we report an exploratory pilot comparison between scripted and adaptive guidance with three participants. The pilot findings suggest that the adaptive condition improved perceived adaptability and contextual relevance, while scripted guidance remained competitive in smoothness and predictability. These results provide preliminary evidence that structured actionable knowledge can help ground language-model-based adaptation in embodied assistive interaction, while also highlighting the need for larger, longitudinal studies to evaluate robustness, generalizability, and long-term user experience.

Luca Vogelgesang, Ahmed Mehdi Soltani, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh +4

Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science and Robotics, University of Montpellier, 30 Pl. Eug`ene Bataillon, Montpellier, 34095, France. · Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Netherlands.

Assistive Robotics Human-Robot Interaction Neuro-Symbolic AI Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning

Mar 31, 2026

Hybrid Framework for Robotic Manipulation: Integrating Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models

This paper introduces a new hybrid framework that combines Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve robotic manipulation tasks. By utilizing RL for accurate low-level control and LLMs for high level task planning and understanding of natural language, the proposed framework effectively connects low-level execution with high-level reasoning in robotic systems. This integration allows robots to understand and carry out complex, human-like instructions while adapting to changing environments in real time. The framework is tested in a PyBullet-based simulation environment using the Franka Emika Panda robotic arm, with various manipulation scenarios as benchmarks. The results show a 33.5% decrease in task completion time and enhancements of 18.1% and 36.4% in accuracy and adaptability, respectively, when compared to systems that use only RL. These results underscore the potential of LLM-enhanced robotic systems for practical applications, making them more efficient, adaptable, and capable of interacting with humans. Future research will aim to explore sim-to-real transfer, scalability, and multi-robot systems to further broaden the framework's applicability.

Md Saad, Sajjad Hussain, Mohd Suhaib

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India · School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

Robotic Manipulation Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning RL for Robotics

Mar 30, 2026

On-Demand Human Assistance for Task Continuation under Physical Action Failures in LLM-based Planning

While robot action planning based on large language models (LLMs) has advanced remarkably, continuing a task after a physical action failure during execution remains a key challenge. For example, after failing to grasp an object, the robot may not notice that it has fallen off the table and keep trying to detect and pick it up, stalling the task. Existing approaches either rely on closed-loop autonomous re-planning, which fails when errors exceed the robot's capabilities, or on human intervention without updating the LLM's plan, hindering subsequent planning. We present a system for LLM-based robot action planning that integrates remote human intervention with feedback-based replanning. When the LLM detects an action failure, the robot requests remote assistance; an operator resolves the failure through teleoperation and reports the outcome in natural language, which is fed back to the LLM to update its plan so that the task can continue. We evaluated the proposed system on a real-world trash-collection task, comparing it with a fully autonomous method and a teleoperation-only baseline. The proposed system improves task progress over the autonomous method in this case study. For easy-to-retrieve trash, the gap from the teleoperation reference was small, while a larger gap remained for harder-to-retrieve trash. These results suggest that, in this case study, combining remote human intervention with feedback-based replanning was associated with continued task execution even in the face of otherwise unrecoverable failures. The project website is https://emergentsystemlabstudent.github.io/REPAIR/.

Shoichi Hasegawa, Akira Taniguchi, Lotfi El Hafi +2

Shoichi Hasegawa and Akira Taniguchi are with Ritsumeikan University; 2-150 Iwakura, Ibaraki, Osaka 567-8570, Japan. · Akira Taniguchi is with Kyushu Institute of Technology; 680-4 Kawadu, Iizuka, Fukuoka 820-0067, Japan. · Lotfi El Hafi is with Coarobo GK; 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Seika, Soura, Kyoto 619-0237, Japan. +4

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Failure Recovery Robot Task Planning Human-Robot Collaboration

Mar 29, 2026

LLM-Enabled Low-Altitude UAV Natural Language Navigation via Signal Temporal Logic Specification Translation and Repair

Natural language (NL) navigation for low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers an intelligent and convenient solution for low-altitude aerial services by enabling an intuitive interface for non-expert operators. However, deploying this capability in urban environments necessitates the precise grounding of underspecified instructions into safety-critical, dynamically feasible motion plans subject to spatiotemporal constraints. To address this challenge, we propose a unified framework that translates NL instructions into Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications and subsequently synthesizes trajectories via mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). Specifically, to generate executable STL formulas from free-form NL, we develop a reasoning-enhanced large language model (LLM) leveraging chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), which ensures high syntactic validity and semantic consistency. Furthermore, to resolve infeasibilities induced by stringent logical or spatial requirements, we introduce a specification repair mechanism. This module combines MILP-based diagnosis with LLM-guided semantic reasoning to selectively relax task constraints while strictly enforcing safety guarantees. Extensive simulations and real-world flight experiments demonstrate that the proposed closed-loop framework significantly improves NL-to-STL translation robustness, enabling safe, interpretable, and adaptable UAV navigation in complex scenarios.

Yuqi Ping, Huahao Ding, Tianhao Liang +6

Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Space-Aerial Networking and Intelligent Sensing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Information Systems Technology and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372 · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China +1

UAV Navigation Robot Navigation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Signal Temporal Logic

Mar 25, 2026

Object Search in Partially-Known Environments via LLM-informed Model-based Planning and Prompt Selection

We present a novel LLM-informed model-based planning framework, and a novel prompt selection method, for object search in partially-known environments. Our approach uses an LLM to estimate statistics about the likelihood of finding the target object when searching various locations throughout the scene that, combined with travel costs extracted from the environment map, are used to instantiate a model, thus using the LLM to inform planning and achieve effective search performance. Moreover, the abstraction upon which our approach relies is amenable to deployment-time model selection via the recent offline replay approach, an insight we leverage to enable fast prompt and LLM selection during deployment. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our LLM-informed model-based planning approach outperforms the baseline planning strategy that fully relies on LLM and optimistic strategy with as much as 11.8% and 39.2% improvements respectively, and our bandit-like selection approach enables quick selection of best prompts and LLMs resulting in 6.5% lower average cost and 33.8% lower average cumulative regret over baseline UCB bandit selection. Real-robot experiments in an apartment demonstrate similar improvements and so further validate our approach.

Abhishek Paudel, Abhish Khanal, Raihan I. Arnob +2

Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Model-Based Planning