  We propose a novel framework for learning high-level cognitive capabilities
in robot manipulation tasks, such as making a smiley face using building
blocks. These tasks often involve complex multi-step reasoning, presenting
significant challenges due to the limited paired data connecting human
instructions (e.g., making a smiley face) and robot actions (e.g., end-effector
movement). Existing approaches relieve this challenge by adopting an open-loop
paradigm decomposing high-level instructions into simple sub-task plans, and
executing them step-by-step using low-level control models. However, these
approaches are short of instant observations in multi-step reasoning, leading
to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose to automatically
collect a cognitive robot dataset by Large Language Models (LLMs). The
resulting dataset AlphaBlock consists of 35 comprehensive high-level tasks of
multi-step text plans and paired observation sequences. To enable efficient
data acquisition, we employ elaborated multi-round prompt designs that
effectively reduce the burden of extensive human involvement. We further
propose a closed-loop multi-modal embodied planning model that autoregressively
generates plans by taking image observations as input. To facilitate effective
learning, we leverage MiniGPT-4 with a frozen visual encoder and LLM, and
finetune additional vision adapter and Q-former to enable fine-grained spatial
perception for manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments to verify the
superiority over existing open and closed-loop methods, and achieve a
significant increase in success rate by 21.4% and 14.5% over ChatGPT and GPT-4
based robot tasks. Real-world demos are shown in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAzID1_qQk .
