A brief description of the Cellular Automata Lightening System (CALS)

We want here to introduce some sketches on the CALS technology with reference to the points hinted by FS in previous communications.
Let us to start with a sample. Suppose to deal with the design of a restaurant room lightening where the ceiling is covered by LEDs. We want the light intensity to adapt to the different and a-priori undeterminable states of affairs that may occur in the room. For example we could want the light intensity decreases close to the tables and increases close to the hall. We can provide a technology that reacts to tables positions and eventually to the density of customers or people in general. Note that the core component of our technology regards the adoption of a Cellular Automata paradigm in order to control the lightening firing. At a glimpse this paradigm is opposite to the centralized one, i.e. it works at a local level imposing single rules on single cells in order to obtain the global and desired behavior as results of the dynamic composition of single cells reactions. What’s the pay off? A first one regards the fact that when a table moves you do not have to re-configure the system. Another one is about modularity: you can export the design realized for a specific project without re-engineering the software implementation.
More generally, this kind of technology may support any design of lightening spaces that evolve together with the occurrence of specific environmental states: whether, density of people, movements of objects, sounds, smoke, etc. . Please consider that the system is conceived as constituted of sets of configurable building blocks organized in a modularity fashion. A building block is a physically independent component behaviorally connected with the neighbors. From the physical viewpoint each component is composed by an actuator part (the LEDs) a sensor sub/system (e.g. motion detectors, RFID- temperature-etc. sensors) and a microcontroller (chip). According to this the same lightening arrangement can be deployed in different environment (i.e environments with different shapes) without re-configuring the whole system but only recombining the building blocks.
We can define the lightening design activity as distributed along different but correlated dimensions as depicted in Figure 1:

The design process at a high level of granularity, involves as first step a negotiation phase between clients and lightening designers. This phase is essentially aimed at refining and eventually reformulating the clients’ needs into design-based specifics.
Up to the present existing technologies provide a way to design a lightening space by drawing the lightening arrangement according to the design-based specifics. However no support is given to the lights allocation: this decision is completely left to the designers competence. The implicit ways designers follows during this process is strongly affected by contextual parameters and constraints, e.g. environment are not static but populated by people interacting each other and interacting with the environment in a not predictable way. Boundaries events, such us environmental light sources (sun, rain, clouds, etc.) or contextual events such us smoke presence or sounds may affect the design decisions. Thus, from the one hand our technology is addressed to improve the lightening-space engineering with a system explicitly developed for implementing strongly interactive environments. From the other it presents as a configuration tool aimed at supporting the designers in defining the lightening system behavior by experimenting different lightening effects produced by different settings.
With respect to the outlined FS product development cycle, our evaluation is the following:
We could provide FS with the Cellular Automata Lightening System (CALS) technology to support both the engineering and the design activities as depicted in Figure 2.

Precisely,
- With a software (“Controller” in Figure 2) to be plugged into modular lightening hardware controlling the lightening activation.
- With a tool (see Figure 2) to be used by FS employees to test the desired lightening effects before the sketches drawing arrangement. In prospective the system could be extended to support the negotiation phase with clients in order to reduce the translation process from the clients’ needs to the design-based specifics by making customers aware of the possible ways to implement their needs

We also could offer design services covering the point number 3. However, starting from the existing prototype (see attached video below) our main idea is to find partners to develop an engineered product to be commercialized.

INTERACT WITH THE VIRTUAL TOUR, it’ll allow you to navigate inside the foundry departments, moving 360°. You’ll find in each unit some interactive boards that through text, images and a video will explain you in details the eight phases of the lost wax casting process.