01 August 2012

Robot Living Buildings

It doesn’t take much to be considered smart if you’re a building. Add some lights that turn themselves off when nobody is around or install an intelligent air conditioning system to regulate the ambient temperature and you’re well on your way. But compared to the living buildings, today’s smart buildings are the architectural equivalent of single-celled organisms.


Using swarms of robotic sensors that ‘chase’ a structure's human occupants, buildings could understand everything about us, down to our emotional state. These robot sensors will learn from their mistakes, self-regulate using digital ‘hormones’, and record information over the course of years, building up a record of experiences to be used as ‘DNA’ to program future versions of themselves, or even other buildings.

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