The goal of this research is to identify ways to inexpensively provide detailed information about energy consumption in buildings and facilitate conservation. By relying on aggregate data, homeowners and facility managers are blind to the contribution of individual appliances and activities to the overall numbers. And while there is adequate evidence that providing real-time, appliance-specific data allows users to achieve significant energy savings, the available solutions in the market are either inadequately granular or prohibitively expensive.
This project will develop the first wireless network of cooperative mobile autonomous robots at a very small scale. In order to achieve this goal, we will face technical and scientific challenges that arise from severe power constraints, space and weight limitations.
With the proliferation of personal mobile computing via mobile phones and the advent of cheap, small sensors, we propose that a new kind of “citizen infrastructure”, CitiSense, can be made pervasive at low cost and high value.
The objective of this inter-disciplinary research is to develop new technologies that transform the streets of a city into a hybrid transportation/communication system, called the Intelligent Road (iRoad), where autonomous wireless devices are co-located with traffic signals, forming a wireless network that fuses real-time transportation data from all over the city to support a wide range of new applications.
