Rafael Gomes Braga

Rafael Gomes Braga, Sina Karimi, Ulrich Dah-Achinanon et al.

Several deployment locations of mobile robotic systems are human made (i.e. urban firefighter, building inspection, property security) and the manager may have access to domain-specific knowledge about the place, which can provide semantic contextual information allowing better reasoning and decision making. In this paper we propose a system that allows a mobile robot to operate in a location-aware and operator-friendly way, by leveraging semantic information from the deployment location and integrating it to the robots localization and navigation systems. We integrate Building Information Models (BIM) into the Robotic Operating System (ROS), to generate topological and metric maps fed to an layered path planner (global and local). A map merging algorithm integrates newly discovered obstacles into the metric map, while a UWB-based localization system detects equipment to be registered back into the semantic database. The results are validated in simulation and real-life deployments in buildings and construction sites.

Sina Karimi, Rafael Gomes Braga, Ivanka Iordanova et al.

With the growth in automated data collection of construction projects, the need for semantic navigation of mobile robots is increasing. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to leverage building-related information for smarter, safer and more precise robot navigation during construction phase. Our use of Building Information Models (BIM) in robot navigation is twofold: (1) the intuitive semantic information enables non-experts to deploy robots and (2) the semantic data exposed to the navigation system allows optimal path planning (not necessarily the shortest one). Our Building Information Robotic System (BIRS) uses Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as the interoperable data format between BIM and the Robotic Operating System (ROS). BIRS generates topological and metric maps from BIM for ROS usage. An optimal path planer, integrating critical components for construction assessment is proposed using a cascade strategy (global versus local). The results are validated through series of experiments in construction sites.