LLM-Craft: Robotic Crafting of Elasto-Plastic Objects with Large Language Models

Abstract: When humans create sculptures, we are able to reason about how geometrically we need to alter the clay state to reach our target goal. We are not computing point-wise similarity metrics, or reasoning about low-level positioning of our tools, but instead determining the higher-level changes that need to be made. In this work, we propose LLM-Craft, a novel pipeline that leverages LLMs to iteratively reason about and generate deformation-based crafting action sequences. We simplify and couple the state and action representations to further encourage shape-based reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, LLM-Craft is the first system successfully leveraging LLMs for complex deformable object interactions. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that with the LLM-Craft framework, LLMs are able to successfully create a set of simple letter shapes. We explore a variety of rollout strategies, and compare performances of LLM-Craft variants with and without an explicit goal shape images. For videos and prompting details, please visit our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/llmcraft/home