Component-based robot prefabricated construction simulation using IFC-based building information models

Abstract

Despite the widespread usage of Building Information Modeling (BIM) based simulation in the construction industry, robot construction simulation environments are built on particular modeling tools and can only be simulated with certain robot models. This not only limits construction robot development and also makes it difficult to directly share building information with robots, which impedes the study of robotic construction. To overcome this problem, we propose a new framework for robotic construction simulation which integrates open standard formats and tools to achieve a commonly used robot simulation environment. This provides a new approach to automatically convert IFC to simulation description format (SDF) and generate building components as smart components, which eliminates platform-specific limitations on robotic construction simulation, which further expands the utilization of BIM models.