Agentic LLM-based robotic systems for real-world applications: a review on their agenticness and ethics

Agentic AI refers to autonomous systems that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve goals with minimal or no human intervention. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new pathways to imbue robots with such “agentic” behaviors by leveraging the LLMs’ vast knowledge and reasoning capabilities for planning and control. This survey provides the first comprehensive exploration of LLM-based robotic systems integration into agentic behaviors that have been validated in real-world applications. We systematically categorized these systems across navigation, manipulation, multi-agent, and general-purpose multi-task robots, reflecting the range of applications explored. We introduce a novel, first-of-its-kind agenticness classification that evaluates existing LLM-driven robotic works based on their degree of autonomy, goal-directed behavior, adaptability, and decision-making. Additionally, central to our contribution is an evaluation framework explicitly addressing ethical, safety, and transparency principles—including bias mitigation, fairness, robustness, safety guardrails, human oversight, explainability, auditability, and regulatory compliance. By jointly mapping the landscape of agentic capabilities and ethical safeguards, we uncover key gaps, tensions, and design trade-offs in current approaches. We believe that this work serves as both a diagnostic and a call to action: as LLM-empowered robots grow more capable, ensuring they remain comprehensible, controllable, and aligned with societal norms is not optional—it is essential.