Ontology-based approach to data exchanges for robot navigation on construction sites

As the use of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) for automated data collection from construction projects increases, construction stakeholders have become aware of a problem with inter-disciplinary semantic data sharing and exchanges between construction and robotic. Cross-domain data translation requires detailed specifications especially when it comes to semantic data translation. Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are the two digital building technologies used to capture and store semantic information for indoor structures and outdoor environments respectively. In the absence of a standard format for data exchanges between the construction and robotic domains, the tools of both industries have yet to be integrated into a coherent deployment infrastructure. In other words, the semantics of BIM-GIS cannot be automatically integrated by the robotic platforms currently being used. To enable semantic data transfer across domains, semantic web technology has been widely used in multi-disciplinary areas for interoperability. This paves the way to smarter, quicker and more precise robot navigation on construction sites. This paper develops a semantic web ontology integrating robot navigation and data collection to convey the meanings from BIM-GIS to the robot. The proposed Building Information Robotic System (BIRS) provides construction data that are semantically transferred to the robotic platform and can be used by the robot navigation software stack on construction sites. To meet this objective, first, knowledge representation between construction and robotic domains is bridged. Then, a semantic database integrated with the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developed, which can communicate with the robot and the navigation system to provide the robot with semantic building data at each step of data collection. Finally, the BIRS proposed system is validated through four case studies.