Science and techno world topic: Future
Meet the man who wants to create architecture that
understands everything about us – down to our emotional states – and learns
from its mistakes
It doesn’t take much to be considered smart if you’re a
building. Add some lights that turn themselves off when nobody is around or
install an “intelligent” air conditioning system to regulate the ambient
temperature and you’re well on your way. But compared to the living buildings
proposed by Akira Mita, today’s smart buildings are the architectural
equivalent of single-celled organisms.
Mita is an engineer, not an architect, and it shows in both
the sophistication of his designs and the scale of his ambition. Using swarms
of robotic sensors that “chase” a structure's human occupants, he wants
buildings to understand everything about us, down to our emotional state. These
robot sensors will learn from their mistakes, self-regulate using digital
“hormones”, and record information over the course of years, building up a
record of experiences to be used as “DNA” to program future versions of
themselves, or even other buildings.
"Living organisms give birth to the next generation,
and have immunity to viruses such as influenza," says Mita in a video promoting
his work. "Our idea was that we wanted to give architecture this kind of
biological response capability."
Mita's vision of buildings that know more about us than
we know about ourselves is enabled by a fundamental re-think of how
"smart" buildings should be constructed. In conventional smart homes,
arrays of sensors and control systems are built into the walls – for example,
sensors that detect whether or not anyone is in a room turn on and off lights
or control the ambient temperature. The problem with systems like these is that
they are obsolete as soon as they are embedded into a structure, and replacing
them in the future could be costly or impossible.
Mita's solution is to replace all those sensor networks
with something like an iPhone on wheels. Early prototypes, called the
"e-bio", are about as big as the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners.
They're equipped with a pair of bat-like ears that can determine the precise
location of sounds. They also have an "eye" that sweeps a laser beam
around the robot, allowing it build a complete, three-dimensional picture of
its surroundings ten times a second.
Like our phones, these mobile, independent
"e-bio" sensors can be upgraded with new technology as it becomes
available, and are easily replaced if they fail. In other words, they're robust
in all the ways that traditional home sensor networks aren't.
Another unconventional dimension of Mita's approach is
his replacement of a whole variety of sensors with humans themselves. In
contrast to a home automation system that strives to maintain a particular
temperature set-point, Mita's team is concentrating on making his robots
hyper-attuned to signals given off by the human beings in a building.
Take the body language or words we use to express the
discomfort we feel with the temperature in a building. In cases like this, the
attendant robots would communicate via a "hormonal" signal. In our
body, hormones have the power to change how our entire nervous system operates,
and over an extended period of time. When Mita’s fire off a hormonal signal,
it’s more than a conventional communication – it’s like an override that
changes how the entire network behaves. In the case of temperature, the network
shifts into a state in which it prioritises the climate of a room. In this way,
control over temperature, humidity, fans and whatever other climate control
measures are present is automatic and invisible to the building’s occupants.
Smart swarms
The more of these robots we have in our homes, the more
intelligent they could be. Picture a carpet of cockroach-like insectoid sensors
on your living room floor but, hopefully, less creepy. Borrowing ideas from
"swarm robotics" – the study of robots that make decisions in the
same distributed way that ants and other insects do – Mita wants his robots to
make consensus decisions about how to alter a building's environment.
It's very similar to how our immune system operates
through a kind of "swarm intelligence", where individual cells aren't
that smart, but collectively they constitute an extremely adaptable system. For
example, your immune system learns to identify and combat an invader without
central coordination – instead, individual elements try a variety of
strategies, and whatever works is eventually copied across your entire immune
response.
In one example of swarm intelligence solving a thorny
problem, Mita’s team figured out how to program a building’s ambient music to
shape the mood of its human occupants. The system has pre-set goals – in this
case, keeping people productive during the day – and accomplishes them by
experimentally adjusting both the familiarity and the tempo of the music piped
through a building. By integrating observations of all the humans present, the
system used a relatively unsophisticated but “swarm intelligent” algorithm to
increase productivity by 69% versus a no-music control.
Another characteristic of living things that Mita is
copying is a concept called "homeostasis," which is just a fancy word
for the fact that organisms are good at maintaining their state of being, even
in the face of things that would perturb them, like an injury or a change in
temperature. (A conventional thermostat is actually a primitive homeostatic
system, in that it reacts to changes in temperature by trying to bring the
house back to a particular set-point, regardless of the source of the
disturbance.)
For example, rather than simply being programmed with
simple instructions like "if a person walks into a room, turn the light
on", Mita's "e-bio" sensors might learn how much light a user
likes. Equipped with their own light sensors, they can adjust ambient light
levels to fit a user's demonstrated preferences. This way, the system
automatically takes into account time of day, clouds, even whether or not the
blinds are drawn, all without actually knowing the state of any of those
variables. (This sort of thing makes even more sense with next-generation LED
lighting systems, which are dimmable and can be formed into almost any shape,
not just that of a lightbulb.)
Reaching Mita's goals for really advanced living
buildings may require something of a handover of the world of architecture,
from designers to engineers. "I think the most interesting thing is that
this research theme has been very hard to handle in previous architectural
faculties," says Mita. "For example, the researchers need to know
about sensors, and to know a lot about information processing as well."
In re-thinking buildings as responsive structures, Mita
doesn't place any limits on how much he thinks we can borrow from biology.
"Ultimately, it would be good if buildings themselves could make their own
DNA and build the next building. But that's a really difficult subject, so all
of us, including the students, are having fun working towards it step by
step."
Source: BBC
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