Abstract

The availability of inspection robots in the construction and operation phases of buildings has led to expanding the scope of applications and increasing technological challenges. Furthermore, the Building Information Modeling (BIM) based approach for robotic inspection is expected to improve the inspection process as the BIM models contain accurate geometry and relevant information at different phases of the lifecycle of a building. Several studies have used BIM for navigation purposes. However, the research in this area is still limited and fragmented, and there is a need to develop an integrated ontology to be used as a first step towards logic-based inspection. This paper aims to develop an Ontology for BIM-based Robotic Navigation and Inspection Tasks (OBRNIT). The semantic representation of OBRNIT was evaluated through a case study. The evaluation confirms that OBRNIT covers the domain's concepts and relationships, and can be applied to develop robotic inspection systems.