Intelligent light control using sensor networks

Abstract

Increasing user comfort and reducing operation costs have always been two primary objectives of building operations and control strategies. Current building control strategies are unable to incorporate occupant level comfort and meet the operation goals simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel utility-based building control strategy that optimizes the tradeoff between meeting user comfort and reduction in operation cost by reducing energy usage. We present an implementation of the proposed approach as an intelligent lighting control strategy that significantly reduces energy cost. Our approach is based on a principled, decision theoretic formulation of the control task. We demonstrate the use of mobile wireless sensor networks to optimize the tradeoff between fulfilling different occupants' light preferences and minimizing energy consumption. We further extend our approach to optimally exploit external light sources for additional energy savings, a process called daylight harvesting. Also we demonstrate that an active sensing approach can maximize the mobile sensor network's lifetime by sensing only during most informative situations. We provide efficient algorithms for solving the underlying complex optimization problems, and extensively evaluate our proposed approach in a proof-of-concept testbed using MICA2 motes and dimmable lamps. Our results indicate a significant improvement in user utility and reduced energy expenditure.

On accurate and efficient statistical counting in sensor-based surveillance systems

“…Figure (2) shows that N circles belong to two disjoint groups G 1 and G 2 at initial deployment time. We note this deployment rarely happens in a dense network, however, we use this example to show the power of partitioning in reducing complexity.…”

“…Wireless sensor networks have been widely used to monitor many types of environments such as battlefields [1], buildings [2] and habitats [3,4]. One of the key design objectives of these monitoring systems is to acquire and verify information about the number of targets/events within the system at any given point of time.…”

A WSN-Based Intelligent Light Control System Considering User Activities and Profiles

“…The network scenario of our system. which covers grids G 7 , G 8 , G 9 , G 12 , G 13 , G 14 , G 17 , G 18 , and G 19 . A local lighting device is one such as a table lamp, which can only provide concentrated illumination.…”

“…Several works [15][16] [19][21] have investigated using WSNs in light control for energy conservation. References [15] and [21] introduce light control using wireless sensors to save energy for commercial buildings.…”

Automatic Collection of Fuel Prices from a Network of Mobile Cameras

“…The technology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been applied to a plethora of application domains, e.g., farming [1], structure monitoring [2], military [3], environmental monitoring [4], home health care [5], home environment control [6] etc. In this paper, we propose a novel application of using WSN to automatically collect prices of fuel 3 from still images of road-side price board of service mobile Internet connectivity, GPS (Global Positioning System) and GIS (Geographic Information System).…”