SYRACUSE — Syracuse University researchers will use $1.2 million in federal funding to work on developing energy-saving technology. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) awarded the money, Syracuse said in a news release. The university will partner with SRI International to develop a “low-cost, high-accuracy” sensor platform that accurately detects human […]
SYRACUSE — Syracuse University researchers will use $1.2 million in federal funding to work on developing energy-saving technology.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) awarded the money, Syracuse said in a news release.
The university will partner with SRI International to develop a “low-cost, high-accuracy” sensor platform that accurately detects human presence inside buildings to “dramatically” reduce energy use in residential settings.
SRI International is a nonprofit research center headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
The agency selected 15 teams from across the U.S. to secure support under ARPA-E’s SENSOR program. SENSOR is short for saving energy nationwide in structures with occupancy recognition.
Their goal is to reduce the amount of energy used for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) by as much as 30 percent.
“One of the major goals of this program is to develop sensor systems, for occupancy detection that will have a huge impact on energy savings if they are successful. The team we have assembled has great expertise in this field of research, and we believe that the technology we are developing could lead to large energy savings,” Senem Velipasalar, principal investigator of the project, said. “We are looking forward to collaborating with SRI and the Syracuse Center of Excellence, and applying our research to providing significant energy savings for residential buildings.”
Velipasalar is a professor in Syracuse’s College of Engineering & Computer Science.
Energy efficiency in buildings
About 13 percent of all energy produced in the U.S. is used to heat, cool and ventilate buildings. HVAC systems are the largest consumers of energy in commercial buildings, totaling 37 percent of all energy used in this sector.
Much of this energy is “wasted” by heating, cooling and over-ventilating unoccupied or partially occupied spaces. Due to a lack of accurate and reliable occupancy information, existing building automation and control systems are “limited in their ability to substantially reduce” HVAC energy use.
“We are delighted to bring SRI’s expertise in embedded vision and machine learning to deliver a portable solution that is robust, and without loss in privacy,” Sek Chai, program director at SRI International, said. “Automated identification of small objects in low-resolution images remains a challenging problem, especially in cluttered environments. Our goal is to develop technology that will result in a disruptive change to the state of the art, enabling distributed IoT devices that are usable, effective, low-cost and easily deployed.”
The Syracuse University researchers, partnered with SRI, will develop a low-cost, high-accuracy residential occupancy sensor that can operate independently for several years on “typical” alkaline batteries.
The device will pair a low-resolution optical camera (which “inherently preserves privacy”) with an infrared sensor, microphone and low-power processor to understand its surroundings and determine human presence.
Researchers will develop algorithms to analyze and combine data from these sensors to enable occupancy sensing that would be “impossible” by each sensor alone. They’ll process the collected data locally, so that the device “will not require” connections to the Internet or cloud to function.
Faculty researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and School of Architecture will be involved in the project.
The Syracuse Center of Excellence for Environmental and Energy Systems “played a vital role in the success” of this proposal and will be a “major contributor” to the execution of the award. NYSERDA and Syracuse University will provide “substantial” cash and in-kind contributions, the school said.
