Millimeter Wave Technology Enables Intelligent Buildings To Be Realized

If the building can be truly intelligent, how will it bring about earth-shaking changes in our lives?

Imagine that if you know the location, whereabouts, and whether they are safe in a commercial building, the building system may change completely. The camera will only turn on the recording function when needed; the lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system can work more efficiently depending on the actual use; if there are too many people in the elevator, the elevator can skip the pause on a particular floor. Imagine that people can open the door automatically when they want to pass through the automatic door like Star Trek.

Just as smart autonomous technologies (including self-driving cars, drones and robots) will completely change the way people move with objects, future buildings will use smart sensors to automatically adjust the system to increase efficiency and comfort and reduce waste. Monitoring people's location and tracking their actions indoors and outdoors is a key sensing function that increases the intelligence of the system and creates intelligent, efficient, and automated buildings of the future.

Sensing technologies in today's building automation include passive infrared (PIR), cameras and active infrared (laser radar, 3D time-of-flight), which face challenges in terms of accuracy, privacy, environmental robustness and system complexity. So that it can not effectively meet the requirements of true intelligence.

TI's millimeter wave (mmWave) technology creates radar-based sensors that overcome the sensing challenges of building automation. TI's millimeter-wave technology provides a point cloud that senses object position and velocity information over a range. Because the technology uses high RF, the sensing capabilities are robust to challenging outdoor conditions such as glare, darkness, fog, smoke, and precipitation. The technology can also be sensed through plastic and drywall, so it can be hidden in some equipment or achieve a cleaner industrial design.

With integrated hardware processing and the on-board DSP core of the TI IWR1642 millimeter-wave sensor, complete edge processing is achieved without the need for complex system topologies or costly external processors.

In the demographic sample, the IWR1642 manages all the software used for tracking and statistics. Only one PC in the sample is used for visualization and configuration without an external processor.

A personnel tracking and statistical reference design using a millimeter wave radar sensor shows how the sample works and how it can be replicated using the IWR1642 Evaluation Module (EVM). TI provides source code in the millimeter-wave software development kit (SDK) and the demographic lab on TI Explorer, which includes all the basic software building blocks, libraries, and algorithms. The sample even contains several examples that support up to 6 and 14 meter use cases.

In the future, we will use the C674x digital signal processor (DSP) on the TI IWR1642 to provide other algorithms such as filtering and classification for building automation applications. Imagine if the motion detection system can ignore the contours of the object, such as trees moving in the wind or leaves falling on the ground, or classifying animals that are galloping through. Enable edge detection to determine if objects should be tracked, this feature will reduce false detections in building automation systems. Millimeter-wave technology provides a wealth of information on range, speed, angle, size, and reflectivity that can be used with the onboard C674x DSP to implement these functions in a single-chip solution.