EAGER: Centralized Control of Large-Scale Distributed Sensor/Actuator Networks: Self-organizing Amorphous Facades

该项目研究主动建筑立面，通过改变其不透明度和透气性来主动为节能做出贡献，作为环境和用户参数的函数，有望为网络科学和物理科学做出重大贡献。当建筑物的某些部分被加热或冷却，但实际上并未被使用时，或者当它们被主动冷却时，如果仅仅打开一扇窗户就足够了，往往会浪费能量。提出的“自组织无定形立面”(SOAF)由大量相同的单元组成，每个单元都可以改变它们的不透明度和透气性，感知光线、温度和占有率，并在分布式集体中相互通信。对于复杂的网络物理系统，这有望提供一种新的设计方法，可能适用于一大类系统，因此将产生对整个社区使用的基础知识。这个高风险、高回报的项目融合了计算机科学和工程的思想，并加入了一些人类生理学和环境科学，为设计、验证和改进多智能体机器人系统的协调策略开发了新的理论基础。该项目的智力优势在于新的算法，允许人们利用分布式计算来大幅降低来自系统的数据的维度，以及将系统的低维控制数据转换为高维控制信号的新算法。特别是，这项研究的重点是分布式算法，可以识别共享相似时空数据的区域，分布式算法，识别时空数据集中的模式和手势，以及分布式算法，自动推导出针对温度和光线的全局控制信号的分布式策略。广泛的影响：该项目的直接影响将是通过主动照明和通风控制，极大地潜在地减少现代建筑的能源足迹。一个相关的影响是引入了使用真正可重新配置的墙来利用空间的新方法。由于它的跨学科性质，横跨计算机科学和土木工程，以及它对环境的积极影响，这个项目可能会吸引有广泛背景和兴趣的学生。它将引入教育模块，让学生使用传感器、无线技术和算法探索建筑中的能量、热传递和太阳能获取，并向学生介绍复杂的网络物理系统的挑战。该倡议建议对妇女和少数群体进行宣传，并建议通过HowToons.com建立一种新的漫画发行机制，使广大受众能够获得CPS的技术成果和环境影响。

This project, investigating active building facades that proactively contribute to energy conservation by changing their opacity and air permeability as a function of environmental and user parameters, promises to contribute strongly to both the cyber and physical sciences. Often energy is wasted when parts of a building are heated or cooled, but are not actually used, or when they are actively cooled if simply opening a window would suffice. The proposed "Self-Organizing Amorphous Facades" (SOAF) consist of a large number of identical cells that can each change their opacity and air permeability, sense light, temperature, and occupancy, and communicate with each other in a distributed collective. For complex cyber physical systems, this promises to provide a novel design methodology that is potentially applicable to a large class of systems and, therefore, will result in foundational knowledge of use to the community at large. This high-risk, high-reward project integrates ideas from computer science and engineering, with a little human physiology and environmental science thrown in, to develop new theoretical foundations for the design, validation, and improvement of coordination strategies for multi-agent robotic systems.The project's intellectual merit lies in novel algorithms that allow one to take advantage of distributed computation to drastically reduce the dimensionality of the data coming from the system, and novel algorithms that turn low-dimensional control data to the system into high-dimensional control signals. In particular, this research focuses on distributed algorithms that can identify regions that share similar spatio-temporal data, distributed algorithms that recognize patterns and gestures in spatio-temporal data sets, and distributed algorithms that automatically derive distributed policies for global control signals on temperature and light.Broader Impacts: The direct impact of this project will be huge potential reduction in the energy footprint of modern buildings by active lighting and ventilation control. A related impact is the introduction of novel ways of using space using truly reconfigurable walls. Due to its interdisciplinary nature spanning computer science and civil engineering together with its positive environment implications, this project is likely to be attractive to students with a broad range of backgrounds and interests. It will lead to educational modules that let students explore energy, heat transfer and solar gains in a building using sensors, wireless technologies, and algorithms, and introduce students to the challenges of complex cyber-physical systems. The PI proposes outreach to women and minorities and suggests a novel mechanism of comic distribution via HowToons.com that will make technical results and environmental impact of CPS accessible to a wide audience.