LLM-Advisor: An LLM Benchmark for Cost-efficient Path Planning across Multiple Terrains
About
Cost-efficient path planning across multiple terrains is a crucial task in robot navigation, requiring the identification of a path from the start to the goal that not only avoids obstacles but also minimizes the overall travel cost. This is especially crucial for real-world applications where robots need to navigate diverse terrains in outdoor environments with limited opportunities for recharging or refueling. Despite its practical importance, cost-efficient path planning across heterogeneous terrains has received relatively limited attention in prior work. In this paper, we propose LLM-Advisor, a prompt-based, planner-agnostic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as non-decisive post-processing advisors for cost refinement, without modifying the underlying planner. While we observe that LLMs may occasionally produce implausible suggestions, we introduce two effective hallucination-mitigation strategies. We further introduce two datasets, MultiTerraPath and RUGD_v2, for systematic evaluation of cost-efficient path planning. Extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, GPT-4-turbo, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and Claude-Opus-4, perform poorly in zero-shot terrain-aware path planning, highlighting their limited spatial reasoning capability. In contrast, the proposed LLM-Advisor (with GPT-4o) improves cost efficiency for 72.37% of A*-planned paths, 69.47% of RRT*-planned paths, and 78.70% of LLM-A*-planned paths. On the MultiTerraPath dataset, LLM-Advisor demonstrates stronger performance on the hard subset, further validating its applicability to real-world scenarios.