Automated Building Inspections Coupling Building Information Modeling and Behavior Trees

Abstract: Automated building inspections using robots are increasingly employed to enhance safety standards and optimize maintenance processes. However, robot-based inspection methods lack adaptability in inspection planning and BIM integration for context-aware navigation. This paper presents a BIM-based inspection framework, leveraging behavior trees for automated planning and execution of robot tasks. The framework extracts spatial and semantic data from BIM models to advance automated inspection. The BIM-based inspection framework is implemented using quadruped robots, and the framework is validated by performing inspection tasks in indoor office environments. The results demonstrate that coupling BIM and behavior trees improves the accuracy and reliability of automated building inspections.