  With growth in the use of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for
automated data collection from construction projects, the problem of
inter-disciplinary semantic data sharing and exchanges between construction and
robotic domains has attracted construction stakeholders' attention.
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 technologies to capture and
store construction data for indoor structure and outdoor environment
respectively. In the absence of a standard format for data exchanges between
the construction and robotic domains, the tools of both industries are yet to
be integrated in a coherent deployment infrastructure. Hence, the semantics of
BIM-GIS cannot be automatically integrated by any robotic platform. To enable
semantic data transfer across domains, semantic web technology has been widely
used in multidisciplinary areas for interoperability. We exploit it to pave the
way to a smarter, quicker and more precise robot navigation on job-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 reach this objective, we
first need to bridge the knowledge representation between construction and
robotic domains. Then, we develop a semantic database to integrate with Robot
Operating System (ROS) which can communicate with the robot and the navigation
system in order to provide the robot with semantic building data at each step
of data collection. Finally, the proposed system is validated through a case
study.
