An Ontology Approach to Context-Aware Robotics for Automated Underwater Bridge Maintenance

Existing underwater bridge maintenance approaches are primarily diver-based, limited in underwater operation cost-effectiveness and safety. Recent advances in underwater robotics offer opportunities to address these limitations. However, a critical challenge lies in enabling the autonomy to be aware of, understand, and reason about maintenance tasks and actions. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an underwater bridge maintenance ontology, which serves as a computer-understandable source of knowledge about underwater maintenance tasks and actions to support the required autonomy. The proposed ontology semantically models entities and relationships that are necessary to enable underwater robot autonomy, including underwater bridge structure components, structure damages, underwater maintenance actions, and underwater environment conditions. As a pilot study, this paper presents the proposed ontology and its verification using competency questions and consistency and redundancy checking in Protégé. The ontology passed the verification, demonstrating its logical coherence and functional relevance to support practical application in the future.