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

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 large language models (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 reason about the deformation behavior of elasto-plastic objects. Furthermore, we find that LLM-Craft is able to successfully create a set of simple letter shapes. Finally, we explore extending the framework to reaching more ambiguous semantic goals, such as "thinner" or "bumpy". For videos please see our website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/llmcraft.