LLM as A Robotic Brain: Unifying Egocentric Memory and Control

Embodied AI focuses on the study and development of intelligent systems that possess a physical or virtual embodiment (i.e. robots) and are able to dynamically interact with their environment. Memory and control are the two essential parts of an embodied system and usually require separate frameworks to model each of them. In this paper, we propose a novel and generalizable framework called LLM-Brain: using Large-scale Language Model as a robotic brain to unify egocentric memory and control. The LLM-Brain framework integrates multiple multimodal language models for robotic tasks, utilizing a zero-shot learning approach. All components within LLM-Brain communicate using natural language in closed-loop multi-round dialogues that encompass perception, planning, control, and memory. The core of the system is an embodied LLM to maintain egocentric memory and control the robot. We demonstrate LLM-Brain by examining two downstream tasks: active exploration and embodied question answering. The active exploration tasks require the robot to extensively explore an unknown environment within a limited number of actions. Meanwhile, the embodied question answering tasks necessitate that the robot answers questions based on observations acquired during prior explorations.