Design and development of an IoT system for air-conditioning control in smart living

A split-type air conditioner is installed in many households and buildings to produce a comfortable environment. The air conditioner is still mostly operated with occupant’s configurations through the remote control. However, it may unexpectedly affect the occupant’s health because of the static configurations. Furthermore, improper configurations can reduce the energy-efficient of the air conditioner usage. Integration of sensing system and a split air conditioner (AC) gives better occupants’ comfort control in a built environment. In order to reach optimal control from the air-conditioning system, various parameters such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed are used to indicate thermal comfort of the occupants. This thesis then designs and develops two thermal-comfort controllers using an occupancy-detection system for the split AC. The occupancy detection system uses a camera sensor to receive scenes of an indoor environment and apply an image processing-based algorithm, to detect the occupant’s position in the room. The proposed controllers, which are conditional control and fuzzy logic control approaches, aim to reach and maintain a thermally comfortable environment by controlling direction and speed of airflow based on the obtained occupant’s position in the room. The experimental results showed that the conditional control and the fuzzy logic control can achieve the comfortable environment for 91.55% and 100 % of the total experimental time, respectively.