Preference-Based Long-Horizon Robotic Stacking with Multimodal Large Language Models

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) can work as high-level robotic planners by reasoning over abstract task descriptions and natural language instructions, etc. However, they have shown a lack of knowledge and effectiveness in planning long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks where the physical properties of the objects are essential. An example is the stacking of containers with hidden objects inside, which involves reasoning over hidden physics properties such as weight and stability. To this end, this paper proposes to use multimodal LLMs as high-level planners for such long-horizon robotic stacking tasks. The LLM takes multimodal inputs for each object to stack and infers the current best stacking sequence by reasoning over stacking preferences. Furthermore, in order to enable the LLM to reason over multiple preferences at the same time without giving explicit instructions, we propose to create a custom dataset considering stacking preferences including weight, stability, size, and footprint, to fine-tune the LLM. Compared to the pretrained LLM with prompt tuning, we demonstrate the improved stacking completion of the LLM fine-tuned with our custom dataset via large-scale simulation evaluation. Furthermore, we showcase the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the long-horizon stacking task on a real humanoid robot in an online manner.