Open-Ended Instruction Realization with LLM-Enabled Multi-Planner Scheduling in Autonomous Vehicles

Most Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research overlooks the maneuvering needs of passengers in autonomous driving (AD). Natural language offers an intuitive interface, yet translating passenger open-ended instructions into control signals—without sacrificing interpretability and traceability—remains a challenge. This study proposes an instruction-realization framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to interpret instructions, generates executable scripts that schedule multiple model predictive control (MPC)-based motion planners based on real-time feedback, and converts planned trajectories into control signals. This scheduling-centric design decouples semantic reasoning from vehicle control at different timescales, establishing a transparent, traceable decision-making chain from high-level instructions to low-level actions. Due to the absence of high-fidelity evaluation tools, this study introduces a benchmark for open-ended instruction realization in a closed-loop setting. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the framework significantly improves task-completion rates over instruction-realization baselines, reduces LLM query costs, achieves safety and compliance on par with specialized AD approaches, and exhibits considerable tolerance to LLM inference latency. For more qualitative illustrations and a clearer understanding, please refer to the videos in the Supplementary Material.