BIM-integrated indoor path planning framework for unmanned ground robot

Featuring manual-intensive labour as the primary source of productivity, the construction industry is plagued with low efficiencies and high safety risks. Increasing ground robots have the potential to address these shorting comings. However, the complicated indoor sites result in many barriers for adopting unmanned ground robots (UGR), especially in path planning. As the basic for the robot movement, reliable indoor path planning is often unavailable due to lack of up-to-date maps and reliable path planning algorithms. This paper presents a BIM-integrated indoor path planning framework for UGRs. First, robot information is integrated into BIM as a knowledge base. Second, a IFC-based layered mapping is proposed to build a robot-centric prior map. After extracting necessary robot properties from BIM base, an improved A* path planning algorithm is introduced to be adaptive to UGRs with different mobilities. Final simulation results have proven the value of this framework.