Large Language Model-Driven Closed-Loop UAV Operation with Semantic Observations

Abstract: Recent advances in LLMs have revolutionized mobile robots, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), enabling their intelligent operation within Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. However, LLMs still face challenges from logical reasoning and complex decision-making, leading to concerns about the reliability of LLM-driven UAV operations in IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a LLM-driven closed-loop control framework that enables reliable UAV operations powered by effective feedback and refinement using two LLM modules, i.e., a Code Generator and an Evaluator. Our framework transforms numerical state observations from UAV operations into natural language trajectory descriptions to enhance the evaluator LLM's understanding of UAV dynamics for precise feedback generation. Our framework also enables a simulation-based refinement process, and hence eliminates the risks to physical UAVs caused by incorrect code execution during the refinement. Extensive experiments on UAV control tasks with different complexities are conducted. The experimental results show that our framework can achieve reliable UAV operations using LLMs, which significantly outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate and completeness with the increase of task complexity.