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arXiv · 2609.13335

Bridging Thought and Action: Taming Long-Horizon Instability in Open-Source LLM Agents with a MetaTool-Enhanced ROS Framework

Kazi Abrar Mahmud·Nilotpaul Kundu Dhurubo·Tamal Kirttonia·Sabbir Hossain Ujjal·Mohammad Ariful Haque
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Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled more natural human-robot interaction, but open-source models often exhibit unstable long-horizon reasoning and inefficient action execution when deployed in agentic robotic frameworks. This paper presents an enhanced ROS-Agent based architecture that improves task reliability and execution efficiency for agentic robotic systems using open-source LLMs. The proposed system introduces a novel intermediate mechanism, termed the MetaTool, which enforces structured planning prior to action execution. Given a natural-language command, the MetaTool induces the LLM to generate a pseudo-code plan of intended tool invocations, which is stored in the ROS-Agent's scratchpad and persists throughout execution. By explicitly separating planning from execution, the proposed approach reduces execution loops and improves deterministic behavior. The architecture is validated on a custom mobile robotic platform with multimodal perception and motion control capabilities. Experimental results on real-world interactive tasks demonstrate improved task completion and contextual consistency, with up to ~24% gains on complex tasks compared to the baseline framework.

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Kazi Abrar Mahmud, Nilotpaul Kundu Dhurubo, Tamal Kirttonia, Sabbir Hossain Ujjal, Mohammad Ariful Haque. 2026-09-11. Bridging Thought and Action: Taming Long-Horizon Instability in Open-Source LLM Agents with a MetaTool-Enhanced ROS Framework. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13335

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