Robot navigation on construction sites using building information modeling and geographic information system

Abstract

Productivity is one of the issues that construction industry needs to address. The interest in gaining higher rate of efficiency in construction projects is growing especially with advancement in other technological disciplines such as robotics, sensors, etc. Among different propositions to cope with productivity issue, construction automation has shown great potential in this regard. Progress monitoring of construction projects is one of the challenges that requires some level of automation. Conventional methods of progress monitoring rely on textual data and subjective interpretation of the employees involved in this regard. With advancement in mobile robots’ capabilities in recent years, the interest in deploying robots on construction sites is increasing since they are able to navigate autonomously and acquire data. The robots can gather new kinds of on-site data that can be used for progress monitoring. One of the steps in mobile robot deployment on construction sites, is the autonomous navigation. Indoor and outdoor robot navigation can be improved with the building-related data namely Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS). The former can provide the building elements features and the latter would provide the surrounding site information of a construction project. BIM-GIS would provide semantic information that can be used for enhanced obstacle avoidance, improved path planning, and semantic navigation. The semantic navigation of mobile robots enables non-experts since they share their domain-specific knowledge. In this dissertation, we develop the following: • A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) using novel methods of bibliometric analysis combined with qualitative analysis to identify the state-of-the-art and the gaps in using BIM and GIS for robot navigation. • An Ontology-based approach to bridge the construction and robot navigation knowledge using established ontologies. The ontology is then used to retrieve the relevant information to be translated to the robotic system. • A BIM-based path planner using IFC semantics integrated with robot navigation system using building elements geometries and semantics. The building-related knowledge used in this research is gathered from different sources including detailed and thorough literature review, a case study and established standards of the robotic domain. We used experimental field test to validate our approach with an industrial partner. This research contributes to the field of robot deployment on construction sites to collect data that can be used for many applications such as progress monitoring, quality control and safety inspection. The developed solutions can be used for safer, easier and more intuitive mobile robot deployment on construction sites.

Date	12 May 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Ivanka Iordanova (Supervisor) & David St-Onge (Co-supervisor)