SafeEmbodAI: a Safety Framework for Mobile Robots in Embodied AI Systems

Embodied AI systems, including AI-powered robots that autonomously interact with the physical world, stand to be significantly advanced by Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable robots to better understand complex language commands and perform advanced tasks with enhanced comprehension and adaptability, highlighting their potential to improve embodied AI capabilities. However, this advancement also introduces safety challenges, particularly in robotic navigation tasks. Improper safety management can lead to failures in complex environments and make the system vulnerable to malicious command injections, resulting in unsafe behaviours such as detours or collisions. To address these issues, we propose \textit{SafeEmbodAI}, a safety framework for integrating mobile robots into embodied AI systems. \textit{SafeEmbodAI} incorporates secure prompting, state management, and safety validation mechanisms to secure and assist LLMs in reasoning through multi-modal data and validating responses. We designed a metric to evaluate mission-oriented exploration, and evaluations in simulated environments demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates threats from malicious commands and improves performance in various environment settings, ensuring the safety of embodied AI systems. Notably, In complex environments with mixed obstacles, our method demonstrates a significant performance increase of 267\% compared to the baseline in attack scenarios, highlighting its robustness in challenging conditions.

A Study on Prompt Injection Attack Against LLM-Integrated Mobile Robotic Systems

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4o into robotic systems represents a significant advancement in embodied artificial intelligence. These models can process multi-modal prompts, enabling them to generate more context-aware responses. However, this integration is not without challenges. One of the primary concerns is the potential security risks associated with using LLMs in robotic navigation tasks. These tasks require precise and reliable responses to ensure safe and effective operation. Multi-modal prompts, while enhancing the robot's understanding, also introduce complexities that can be exploited maliciously. For instance, adversarial inputs designed to mislead the model can lead to incorrect or dangerous navigational decisions. This study investigates the impact of prompt injections on mobile robot performance in LLM-integrated systems and explores secure prompt strategies to mitigate these risks. Our findings demonstrate a substantial overall improvement of approximately 30.8% in both attack detection and system performance with the implementation of robust defence mechanisms, highlighting their critical role in enhancing security and reliability in mission-oriented tasks.

Embodied AI in Mobile Robots: Coverage Path Planning with Large Language Models

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and solving mathematical problems, leading to advancements in various fields. We propose an LLM-embodied path planning framework for mobile agents, focusing on solving high-level coverage path planning issues and low-level control. Our proposed multi-layer architecture uses prompted LLMs in the path planning phase and integrates them with the mobile agents' low-level actuators. To evaluate the performance of various LLMs, we propose a coverage-weighted path planning metric to assess the performance of the embodied models. Our experiments show that the proposed framework improves LLMs' spatial inference abilities. We demonstrate that the proposed multi-layer framework significantly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of these tasks by leveraging the natural language understanding and generative capabilities of LLMs. Our experiments show that this framework can improve LLMs' 2D plane reasoning abilities and complete coverage path planning tasks. We also tested three LLM kernels: gpt-4o, gemini-1.5-flash, and claude-3.5-sonnet. The experimental results show that claude-3.5 can complete the coverage planning task in different scenarios, and its indicators are better than those of the other models.

A Superalignment Framework in Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models

Over the last year, significant advancements have been made in the realms of large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in their application to autonomous driving. These models have showcased remarkable abilities in processing and interacting with complex information. In autonomous driving, LLMs and MLLMs are extensively used, requiring access to sensitive vehicle data such as precise locations, images, and road conditions. These data are transmitted to an LLM-based inference cloud for advanced analysis. However, concerns arise regarding data security, as the protection against data and privacy breaches primarily depends on the LLM's inherent security measures, without additional scrutiny or evaluation of the LLM's inference outputs. Despite its importance, the security aspect of LLMs in autonomous driving remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, our research introduces a novel security framework for autonomous vehicles, utilizing a multi-agent LLM approach. This framework is designed to safeguard sensitive information associated with autonomous vehicles from potential leaks, while also ensuring that LLM outputs adhere to driving regulations and align with human values. It includes mechanisms to filter out irrelevant queries and verify the safety and reliability of LLM outputs. Utilizing this framework, we evaluated the security, privacy, and cost aspects of eleven large language model-driven autonomous driving cues. Additionally, we performed QA tests on these driving prompts, which successfully demonstrated the framework's efficacy.