Adaptive Lighting Homepage

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Principle Investigator: Joseph Paradiso
Research Group: Responsive Environments, MIT Media Lab
Research Assistants: Matt Aldrich, Nan Zhao
Undergraduate Researchers: Akash Badshah


Alumni: Ben Lee

Thanks: This work is made possible by direct funding from the MIT Media Lab and hardware contributions from Philips-Color Kinetics.

updated: 2012-02-10

About

Occupants of near-future buildings will not necessarily be able to flip a light switch or adjust a thermostat to control building utilities. There may well be too many devices to easily control with direct "switches," and instead they will need to be driven by inferred intention or simple, intuitive, collective control. More crucially, as about 40% of the energy used in the US and most developed economies tends to be consumed in homes and buildings [1], energy conservation concerns will pull our hand off the dial as environments will regulate themselves in order to accommodate occupants' objectives and best tend to their comfort while minimizing energy consumption. Accordingly, smart energy management will be a needed and motivating application area of solid-state lighting, as user state, behavior and context are measured, inferred, and leveraged across a variety of domains and environments using sensors and actuators to mitigate energy usage.

Lighting, in particular, accounts for 22% of all electricity consumed in the United States [2]. While simple motion sensors are now commonly integrated into new buildings to turn lights off when occupants leave an illumined area, they provide very coarse control input, often causing more area than is necessary to be lit or mistakenly turning lights off when an occupant stays still for too long. As we move into robustly sensed and finely actuated environments, lighting will become richly responsive, dynamically adapting to users' needs while mitigating energy use.

[1] U.S. Energy Information Administration., "Energy Consumption by Sector", Annual Energy Review, 2006 (2007).

[2] Navigent Consulting, Inc., "Solid-state lighting research and development portfolio: Multi-year program plan fy'09-fy'15," tech. rep., Lighting Research and Development Building Technologies Program, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Chicago (2009).

Tools

We have created a suite of MATLAB tools for calculating the lux and color rendering index of virtual and measured light sources. The scripts and documentation are hosted at Matlab Central.

Media

News

Videos

Images

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Recent smart lighting demo at Ubicomp 2010 in Copenhagen.

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The portable demo with two of four lights pictured and a control node (Ubicomp 2010, Copenhagen)

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Controlling the two pentachromatic sources using the sensor node.

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The phosphor-based lighting testbed.

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User working on the closed-loop phosphor-LED testbed.

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Example five-wavelength LED array.

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Debugging and testing of the sensor node prototype.

Publications

Lee, B., Aldrich, M., and Paradiso, J., "Methods for measuring work surface illuminance in adaptive solid state lighting networks ," Proc. SPIE 8123, 81230V (2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.893562

Paradiso, J.A., Aldrich, M., Zhao, N., "Energy-efficient control of solid-state lighting ," SPIE Newsroom, March 25 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.860755

Aldrich, M., Zhao, N., and Paradiso, J., "Energy efficient control of polychromatic solid-state lighting using a sensor network," Proc. SPIE vol. 7784, 778408 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.860755

Theses

Aldrich, M., Dynamic Solid State Lighting, Master's Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010).

Zhao, N., Smart Solid-State Lighting Control, Diplom, RWTH Aachen University (2010).