Traditional robot navigation systems primarily utilize occupancy grid maps and laser-based sensing technologies, as demonstrated by the popular move_base package in ROS. Unlike robots, humans navigate not only through spatial awareness and physical distances but also by integrating external information, such as elevator maintenance updates from public notification boards and experiential knowledge, like the need for special access through certain doors. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), which posses text understanding and intelligence close to human performance, there is now an opportunity to infuse robot navigation systems with a level of understanding akin to human cognition. In this study, we propose using osmAG (Area Graph in OpensStreetMap textual format), an innovative semantic topometric hierarchical map representation, to bridge the gap between the capabilities of ROS move_base and the contextual understanding offered by LLMs. Our methodology employs LLMs as actual copilot in robot navigation, enabling the integration of a broader range of informational inputs while maintaining the robustness of traditional robotic navigation systems. Our code, demo, map, experiment results can be accessed at https://github.com/xiexiexiaoxiexie/Intelligent-LiDAR-Navigation-LLM-as-Copilot.

We present a learning-based mapless motion planner by taking the sparse 10-dimensional range findings and the target position with respect to the mobile robot coordinate frame as input and the continuous steering commands as output. Traditional motion planners for mobile ground robots with a laser range sensor mostly depend on the obstacle map of the navigation environment where both the highly precise laser sensor and the obstacle map building work of the environment are indispensable. We show that, through an asynchronous deep reinforcement learning method, a mapless motion planner can be trained end-to-end without any manually designed features and prior demonstrations. The trained planner can be directly applied in unseen virtual and real environments. The experiments show that the proposed mapless motion planner can navigate the nonholonomic mobile robot to the desired targets without colliding with any obstacles.