A Proposed Ontology for Knowledge Representation in Designing Building Inspection Robot Systems

Robotic technology is now rapidly penetrating the building inspection field and has great potential in improving inspection efficiency and accuracy. However, existing building inspection robot systems are usually designed to adapt to limited application scenarios. Making use of building inspection domain knowledge especially knowledge about building inspection tasks and physical surroundings of building defects is essential to tackle the problems of existing building inspection robot systems. To support knowledge sharing between building inspection and robotics domains and collaborative design processes, a high-level shared ontology is developed in this study to formalize the knowledge that is relevant to the design of a building inspection robot system. It contains two main domain ontology models including a Robot System Model and a Building Inspection Model.