Project Website http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/lighting/
We have constructed a variety of lighting networks to optimize the electrical and photometric properties of solid-state lighting while meeting the illumination levels set by the user.
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, 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. 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.