A BIM-Integrated Robotics Application for Color Spraying in Construction

Construction robotics applications are challenged by the unstructured and dynamic nature of the site environment. The technological challenges to realize automation systems in construction can be alleviated by considering modern approaches that exploit digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of buildings, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). Our proposed approach allows one to ease the deployment of a construction robotics application through the use of BIM. We exploit BIM-data to enable a user-friendly definition of robot operations on-site through a software library which interfaces BIM with the robot-control software. We demonstrate the application of our approach on a robotic spray-painting case study, exploiting the BIM information to achieve path planning of the cartesian trajectory for spray-painting avoiding areas that must not be colored.