Related papers: Enabling Self-aware Smart Buildings by Augmented R…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
Increasing energy efficiency in buildings can reduce costs and emissions substantially. Historically, this has been treated as a local, or single-agent, optimization problem. However, many buildings utilize the same types of thermal…
It is envisioned that building systems will become active participants in the smart grid operation by controlling their energy consumption to optimize complex criteria beyond ensuring local end-use comfort satisfaction. A forecast of the…
Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have permeated through an array of different immersive environments, including virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. AI brings a wealth of potential that centers on its ability to…
The fact that a proper HVAC control strategy can reduce the energy consumption of a building by up to 45% has driven significant research in demand-based HVAC control. This paper presents a novel framework for modeling and analysis of…
This paper describes a step-by-step procedure that converts a physical model of a building into a Markov Process that characterizes energy consumption of this and other similar buildings. Relative to existing thermo-physics-based building…
Managing supply and demand in the electricity grid is becoming more challenging due to the increasing penetration of variable renewable energy sources. As significant end-use consumers, and through better grid integration, buildings are…
Thermal comfort in shared spaces is essential to occupants well-being and necessary in the management of energy consumption. Existing thermal control systems for indoor shared spaces adjust temperature set points mechanically, making it…
In augmented reality (AR), where digital content is overlaid onto the real world, realistic thermal feedback has been shown to enhance immersion. Yet current thermal feedback devices, heavily influenced by the needs of virtual reality,…
Modern commercial Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) devices form a complex and interconnected thermodynamic system with the building and outside weather conditions, and current setpoint control policies are not fully…
Improving the energy-efficiency of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has the potential to realize large economic and societal benefits. This paper concerns the system identification of a hybrid system model of a…
Different factors such as thermal comfort, humidity, air quality, and noise have significant combined effects on the acceptability and quality of the activities performed by the building occupants who spend most of their times indoors.…
In this paper, we design real-time decentralized and distributed control schemes for Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems in energy efficient buildings. The control schemes balance user comfort and energy saving, and are…
Human-machine interaction (HMI) and human-robot interaction (HRI) can assist structural monitoring and structural dynamics testing in the laboratory and field. In vibratory experimentation, one mode of generating vibration is to use…
A smart home can be considered a place of residence that enables the management of appliances and systems to help with day-to-day life by automated technology. In the current paper is described a prototype that simulates a context-aware…
In the past few years, several case studies have illustrated that the use of occupancy information in buildings leads to energy-efficient and low-cost HVAC operation. The widely presented techniques for occupancy estimation include…
This paper demonstrates that continual relearning of control policies using incremental deep reinforcement learning (RL) can improve policy learning for non-stationary processes. We demonstrate this approach for a data-driven 'smart…
Energy consumption in buildings, both residential and commercial, accounts for approximately 40% of all energy usage in the U.S., and similar numbers are being reported from countries around the world. This significant amount of energy is…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
Optimizing the operation of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is a challenging task, requiring the modeling of complex nonlinear relationships among HVAC load, indoor temperatures, and outdoor environments. This…