Biofication of Buildings: A New Solution Beyond Structural Control

Abstract eng:
Sustainability of urban systems is dependent on knowing in a quantitative manner conditions such as level of deterioration and level of safety of major structures. Sensors are key devices for acquiring such necessary information, but in addition it is required that there be technology to extract only the relevant information from the tremendous amount of sensor gathered data. The structural health monitoring (SHM), ascendant in civil engineering, has been studied and developed in our laboratory for several years. Our SHM system consists of a smart sensor network (for data acquisition), a database server (for data storage and data management), and diagnosis and prognosis applications. Civil engineering sensors and networks, however, can be extended to more novel roles -- detecting and recording the histories of environmental conditions of structures. Among many potential applications, we are particularly interested in using robots as moving sensor agents, that we call sensor agent robots, to gather information on buildings and residents. The information obtained by the sensor agent robots is used to record life phases of the environment relevant to buildings. The information is then transformed to “genes” to be passed the important information to future “generations” of buildings. We call this concept “biofication of buildings” and are working to integrate the concept. The “biofication of buildings” shall be our new research target beyond structural control. This paper briefly introduces the outline of this concept and some preliminary experiments.

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