Department or Field of Research
School of Architecture
Submission type
Oral Presentation Proposal
Disciplines
Computational Engineering | Electrical and Computer Engineering
Keywords
Smart Building, Room Occupancy Counting, Internet of Things (IoT), Active Infrared, Gate Monitoring
Brief Description
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted. If the number of humans in each pre-determined thermal zone is aware, a building automation system (BAS) is able to intelligently adjust HVAC operation for each thermal zone to provide “just-enough” heating, cooling and ventilation to building users. Therefore, a people counting device that can be widely deployed with low price and failure rate, small form-factor, good usability, and conserved user privacy is highly desirable. Existing room occupancy detection sensors (e.g., passive infrared, camera, acoustic, RFID, CO2) cannot meet all these above system requirements. In this work, we present an IoT (Internet of Things) prototype that collects room occupancy information to assist energy efficient building operation. A proposed IoT prototype consists of a Lattice iCE40-HX1K stick board and a Raspberry Pi3 module. An application user interface is also developed to allow anonymous users to easily online acquire room occupancy information. If a pair of IoT prototypes are installed at each side of a door opening, when a person walks through this door, infrared signal communication between this pair of IoT prototypes is blocked and detected. Similarly, if two pairs of IoT prototypes are utilized, moving direction is obtained by comparing the occurrence time of two signal blocking events. Thus, the increase or decrease of the number of humans in a room is figured out. We carried out 200 trials of random testing of human walking through the door opening, and found a 97% success rate of event detection. The proposed design is completely made of off-the-shelf electronic components with an estimated cost of less than $160. In conclusion, the proposed design is miniature, non-intrusive, ease of use, low failure rate and cost effective.
presentation slides
A Smart Internet of Things (IoT) Prototype for Accurate People Counting Towards Energy Efficient Buildings
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted. If the number of humans in each pre-determined thermal zone is aware, a building automation system (BAS) is able to intelligently adjust HVAC operation for each thermal zone to provide “just-enough” heating, cooling and ventilation to building users. Therefore, a people counting device that can be widely deployed with low price and failure rate, small form-factor, good usability, and conserved user privacy is highly desirable. Existing room occupancy detection sensors (e.g., passive infrared, camera, acoustic, RFID, CO2) cannot meet all these above system requirements. In this work, we present an IoT (Internet of Things) prototype that collects room occupancy information to assist energy efficient building operation. A proposed IoT prototype consists of a Lattice iCE40-HX1K stick board and a Raspberry Pi3 module. An application user interface is also developed to allow anonymous users to easily online acquire room occupancy information. If a pair of IoT prototypes are installed at each side of a door opening, when a person walks through this door, infrared signal communication between this pair of IoT prototypes is blocked and detected. Similarly, if two pairs of IoT prototypes are utilized, moving direction is obtained by comparing the occurrence time of two signal blocking events. Thus, the increase or decrease of the number of humans in a room is figured out. We carried out 200 trials of random testing of human walking through the door opening, and found a 97% success rate of event detection. The proposed design is completely made of off-the-shelf electronic components with an estimated cost of less than $160. In conclusion, the proposed design is miniature, non-intrusive, ease of use, low failure rate and cost effective.
Comments
This work was supported by CASA summer research and required to present in the CASA symposium this year. Yet, the full paper has been submitted to Construction Research Congress (CRC) 2018. To avoid two submissions for one work, Karen Johnson told me to only upload the abstract.