Robust Mobile Robot Path Planning via LLM-Based Dynamic Waypoint Generation

Abstract: Mobile robot path planning in complex environments remains a significant challenge, especially in achieving efficient, safe and robust paths. The traditional path planning techniques like DRL models typically trained for a given configuration of the starting point and target positions, these models only perform well when these conditions are satisfied. In this paper, we proposed a novel path planning framework that embeds LLMs to empower mobile robots with the capability of dynamically interpreting natural language commands and autonomously generating efficient, collision-free navigation paths. The proposed framework uses LLMs to translate high-level user inputs into actionable waypoints while dynamically adjusting paths in response to obstacles. We experimentally evaluated our proposed LLM-based approach across three different environments of progressive complexity, showing the robustness of our approach with llama3.1 model that outperformed other LLM models in path planning time, waypoint generation success rate, and collision avoidance. This underlines the promising contribution of LLMs for enhancing the capability of mobile robots, especially when their operation involves complex decisions in large and complex environments. Our framework has provided safer, more reliable navigation systems and opened a new direction for the future research. The source code of this work is publicly available on GitHub.