Biofied building: Interactive and adaptive building using sensor agent robots

Evaluating and recording building conditions in a quantitative manner such as level of deterioration and level of safety has been recognized an important research area and is called structural health monitoring (SHM). The (SHM) system has been studied and developed in our laboratory for many years. Our SHM system consists of a smart sensor network (for data acquisition), a database server, and a diagnosis and prognosis server. The SHM, however, can be extended to more novel roles - detecting and recording the histories of environmental conditions of building structures and flexibly adjust to the environments. Living matter has very flexible and smart adaption mechanisms in nature as categorized into four, sensory adaption, adaption by learning, physiological adaption, and evolutionary adaption. We would like to implement these adaption mechanisms into buildings. We call this concept "biofied building" or "biofication of living spaces" and are working to integrate the concept. We are particularly interested in using robots as sensor agents to gather information of buildings and residents and interact with them. The information obtained by the sensor agent robots is used to record all aspects of life phases of the environment relevant to buildings. This paper presents some aspects of the "biofied building" research conducted at our laboratory.