LLM A*: Human in the Loop Large Language Models Enabled A* Search for Robotics

This research focuses on how Large Language Models (LLMs) can help with path planning for mobile embodied agents such as robots, in a human-in-the-loop and interactive manner. A novel framework named LLM A*, aims to leverage the commonsense of LLMs, and the utility-optimal A* is proposed to facilitate few-shot near-optimal path planning. Prompts are used to 1) provide LLMs with essential information like environment, cost, heuristics, etc.; 2) communicate human feedback to LLMs on intermediate planning results. This makes the whole path planning process a `white box' and human feedback guides LLM A* to converge quickly compared to other data-driven methods such as reinforcement learning-based (RL) path planning. In addition, it makes code-free path planning practical, henceforth promoting the inclusiveness of artificial intelligence techniques. Comparative analysis against A* and RL shows that LLM A* is more efficient in terms of search space and achieves an on-a-par path with A* and a better path than RL. The interactive nature of LLM A* also makes it a promising tool for deployment in collaborative human-robot tasks.