Supported by the National Science Foundation

ScaledHome

This project centers about the building of the ScaledHome as a physical, scaled model of an IoT enabled suburban home. ScaledHome is intended to facilitate experiments with arbitrary home configurations that would be prohibitively expensive or even impossible to do with real-world homes. The sensors of the planned model capture temperature, humidity and light in every room, measure the energy consumption and track the solar power generation and energy storage capabilities. Actuators will control doors, windows and shutters, air conditioning and heating units as well as reproduce the weather conditions.

The system will support both autonomous and human-in-the-loop experimentation for smart home and smart grid scenarios

Since 2018 our group at the AI Things Laboratory built two prototype scaled home models as part of Turgut's NSF REU grants CNS 1560302 and 1852002. Both prototypes were built with off-the-shelf sensors and actuators connected to Raspberry Pi units. The first, simplest model ScaledHome-1 [Ling-2019-GLOBECOM], developed during Summer 2018, allowed us to gain experience with the implementation and identify modeling challenges. Starting from this experience, ScaledHome-2 [Burns-2020-ICC,Mendula-Thesis-2020] was built during Summer 2019 as a much more complex model, containing 15 actuators, an environmental enclosure for weather simulation and a web-based experiment control system that allows the remote execution of experiments. The latter allowed us to perform experiments with ScaledHome-2 from Bologna Italy during the COVID-19 lockdown, without local supervision.


ScaledHome-1 prototype ScaledHome-1 prototype ScaledHome-1 prototype A failed window mechanism The prototype environmental enclosure Testing a window mechanism Testing a window mechanism Wiring of the model Wiring inside the model Layout of the model The experiment control interface Simplified layout of the model The model inside the environmental enclosure The completed walls of the model

Publications