L3M+P: Lifelong Planning with Large Language Models
This addresses the problem of enabling robots to plan continuously in dynamic environments for long-term service tasks, representing an incremental advancement over existing LLM-based planning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of scaling planning methods for general-purpose service robots by introducing L3M+P, a framework that uses an external knowledge graph to maintain a dynamic memory of the environment, enabling lifelong planning with multi-modal updates. It achieves significant improvement over baselines in accurately registering state changes and generating correct plans in household robot simulators and real-world deployments.
By combining classical planning methods with large language models (LLMs), recent research such as LLM+P has enabled agents to plan for general tasks given in natural language. However, scaling these methods to general-purpose service robots remains challenging: (1) classical planning algorithms generally require a detailed and consistent specification of the environment, which is not always readily available; and (2) existing frameworks mainly focus on isolated planning tasks, whereas robots are often meant to serve in long-term continuous deployments, and therefore must maintain a dynamic memory of the environment which can be updated with multi-modal inputs and extracted as planning knowledge for future tasks. To address these two issues, this paper introduces L3M+P (Lifelong LLM+P), a framework that uses an external knowledge graph as a representation of the world state. The graph can be updated from multiple sources of information, including sensory input and natural language interactions with humans. L3M+P enforces rules for the expected format of the absolute world state graph to maintain consistency between graph updates. At planning time, given a natural language description of a task, L3M+P retrieves context from the knowledge graph and generates a problem definition for classical planners. Evaluated on household robot simulators and on a real-world service robot, L3M+P achieves significant improvement over baseline methods both on accurately registering natural language state changes and on correctly generating plans, thanks to the knowledge graph retrieval and verification.