Exploring Unseen Environments with Robots using Large Language and Vision Models through a Procedurally Generated 3D Scene Representation

Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), have enabled the prospect of leveraging cognitive planners within robotic systems. This work focuses on solving the object goal navigation problem by mimicking human cognition to attend, perceive and store task specific information and generate plans with the same. We introduce a comprehensive framework capable of exploring an unfamiliar environment in search of an object by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models(LLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in understanding the underlying semantics of our world. A challenging task in using LLMs to generate high level sub-goals is to efficiently represent the environment around the robot. We propose to use a 3D scene modular representation, with semantically rich descriptions of the object, to provide the LLM with task relevant information. But providing the LLM with a mass of contextual information (rich 3D scene semantic representation), can lead to redundant and inefficient plans. We propose to use an LLM based pruner that leverages the capabilities of in-context learning to prune out irrelevant goal specific information.