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Main Authors: Zhang, Yuqing, Kantaros, Yiannis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04141
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author Zhang, Yuqing
Kantaros, Yiannis
author_facet Zhang, Yuqing
Kantaros, Yiannis
contents Several planners have been proposed to compute robot paths that reach desired goal regions while avoiding obstacles. However, these methods fail when all pathways to the goal are blocked. In such cases, the robot must reason about how to reconfigure the environment to access task-relevant regions - a problem known as Navigation Among Movable Objects (NAMO). While various solutions to this problem have been developed, they often struggle to scale to highly cluttered environments. To address this, we propose NAMO-LLM, a sampling-based planner that searches over robot and obstacle configurations to compute feasible plans specifying which obstacles to move, where, and in what order. Its key novelty is a non-uniform sampling strategy guided by Large Language Models (LLMs) biasing the tree construction toward directions more likely to yield a solution. We show that NAMO-LLM is probabilistically complete and demonstrate through experiments that it efficiently scales to cluttered environments, outperforming related works in both runtime and plan quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04141
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NAMO-LLM: Efficient Navigation Among Movable Obstacles with Large Language Model Guidance
Zhang, Yuqing
Kantaros, Yiannis
Robotics
Several planners have been proposed to compute robot paths that reach desired goal regions while avoiding obstacles. However, these methods fail when all pathways to the goal are blocked. In such cases, the robot must reason about how to reconfigure the environment to access task-relevant regions - a problem known as Navigation Among Movable Objects (NAMO). While various solutions to this problem have been developed, they often struggle to scale to highly cluttered environments. To address this, we propose NAMO-LLM, a sampling-based planner that searches over robot and obstacle configurations to compute feasible plans specifying which obstacles to move, where, and in what order. Its key novelty is a non-uniform sampling strategy guided by Large Language Models (LLMs) biasing the tree construction toward directions more likely to yield a solution. We show that NAMO-LLM is probabilistically complete and demonstrate through experiments that it efficiently scales to cluttered environments, outperforming related works in both runtime and plan quality.
title NAMO-LLM: Efficient Navigation Among Movable Obstacles with Large Language Model Guidance
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04141