Home Automation

Home Automation

Introduction

Home automation, also called domotics, has the goal of minimizing human labor and discomfort. The key aspects of home automation are security, home entertainment, laborsaving white goods (appliances), environmental control, and network control [1]. The goal is to unify various systems within a house into one whole, intelligent system that minimizes the amount of time and effort the user spends on attending household tasks while maximizing security and convenience. This paper describes the home automation systems currently on the market, explains how such systems work, and gives a brief market analysis.

Current Market: State of the Art Domotics

IVCi sells one modern aspect of home automation, lighting. IVCi's home system will remember the patterns of when a user flips each light switch such that the system will eventually turn on all the appropriate lights when the user enters the house. Another useful tool is to make the lights follow the usual pattern when the user is on vacation, thus discouraging thieves by making them believe someone is still at home [2].

Cortexa is a good example of a system that integrates the lighting into a more complete system. Cortexa's My Home product lets customers control nearly all home systems: audio, video, lighting, climate, security, shades, irrigation, and audio-video controls [3]. At the heart of the product is Cortexa's 7202 Home Controller, which connects to a monitor to allow customers to virtually control the entire home and yard from one location [4]. While a partial home automation system such as the lighting will be in the range of a several hundred dollars, a more complete system such as Cortexa's will be in the range of several thousand dollars. The Cortexa main controller alone starts at roughly $1,900 [3].

Domotics is continuously being improved. Several areas of development involve a home's recognition of individuals and their location and improved interfaces, such that the user may eventually be able to simply talk to the house. The market is fueling the development of domotics. In Europe, for example, the home automation market is expected to roughly double from revenues of $ 232.6M in 2006 to $ 446.6M in 2013 [5].

How Domotics Works

Building Blocks

Home automation products are normally composed to sensors, actors, and control units. The system architecture is centralized, distributed, or mixed. A centralized system has all appliances feeding into one unit that makes all decisions, while a distributed system will distribute the decision-making among individual appliances.

Sensors could be RFID readers, electronic thermometers, microphones, photo sensors, cameras, moisture sensors, and anything else that retrieves information from the environment. Actors could be relays, speakers, monitors, electric door strikes, electric motors, and anything else that acts on the environment. In the Cortexa system, the motors that raise and lower the shades are the actors, while the circuit that reads a clock to determine whether it's dark outside is the sensor (of time).

A controller analyses the sensors' inputs, then outputs the proper directives to the actors. A controller typically includes