  Several deployment locations of mobile robotic systems are human made (i.e.
urban firefighter, building inspection, property security) and the manager may
have access to domain-specific knowledge about the place, which can provide
semantic contextual information allowing better reasoning and decision making.
In this paper we propose a system that allows a mobile robot to operate in a
location-aware and operator-friendly way, by leveraging semantic information
from the deployment location and integrating it to the robots localization and
navigation systems. We integrate Building Information Models (BIM) into the
Robotic Operating System (ROS), to generate topological and metric maps fed to
an layered path planner (global and local). A map merging algorithm integrates
newly discovered obstacles into the metric map, while a UWB-based localization
system detects equipment to be registered back into the semantic database. The
results are validated in simulation and real-life deployments in buildings and
construction sites.
