Guide-LLM: An Embodied LLM Agent and Text-Based Topological Map for Robotic Guidance of People with Visual Impairments
This addresses navigation difficulties for people with visual impairments, representing an incremental improvement over traditional aids by leveraging LLMs for enhanced guidance.
The paper tackles the challenge of indoor navigation for people with visual impairments by introducing Guide-LLM, an embodied LLM agent that uses a text-based topological map for path planning, with simulated experiments showing it provides efficient, adaptive, and personalized assistance.
Navigation presents a significant challenge for persons with visual impairments (PVI). While traditional aids such as white canes and guide dogs are invaluable, they fall short in delivering detailed spatial information and precise guidance to desired locations. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) offer new avenues for enhancing assistive navigation. In this paper, we introduce Guide-LLM, an embodied LLM-based agent designed to assist PVI in navigating large indoor environments. Our approach features a novel text-based topological map that enables the LLM to plan global paths using a simplified environmental representation, focusing on straight paths and right-angle turns to facilitate navigation. Additionally, we utilize the LLM's commonsense reasoning for hazard detection and personalized path planning based on user preferences. Simulated experiments demonstrate the system's efficacy in guiding PVI, underscoring its potential as a significant advancement in assistive technology. The results highlight Guide-LLM's ability to offer efficient, adaptive, and personalized navigation assistance, pointing to promising advancements in this field.