Biophilic control systems are moving from theoretical conception to engineering practice. They integrate the wisdom of natural organisms with extremely sophisticated technical control to create new systems that are more efficient, more sustainable, and better able to adapt to changes in the environment. This type of system no longer treats natural elements as mere decoration or resources, but deeply integrates core biological functions (such as perception, adaptation, and self-healing) with algorithms, sensors, and actuators. It represents a fundamental shift from trying to use technology to completely “conquer” nature, to learning and working with nature.
How to integrate the wisdom of natural creatures into modern control theory
A profound "biological" change is taking place in modern control theory. In the past, the design of complex systems often pursued centralization and global optimization. However, it became quite fragile when encountering dynamic changes, incomplete information, or component failures. The biological system in nature has experienced hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and it has given a completely different template. For example, a bee swarm or a colony does not have a central brain. Countless individuals interact based on simple rules and local information, but they can achieve overall goals such as efficient foraging and building complex nests. This inspired control theorists to re-examine the system architecture and regard reliability and survivability as core performance indicators. Today's new research direction is to design a system that is composed of many subsystems, each of which has different local information and decision-making rights. However, they can work together for a common goal and can also adapt to changes in the environment or component failures. To be precise, it uses engineering language to re-elaborate and attempt to realize ancient problems that have long been solved by living organisms.
Putting biological intelligence into control is not just about imitating the form, but extracting its underlying logic. The focus is on analyzing the closed loop of biological perception, decision-making, and execution. Biological perceptions of their environment, like plants growing toward light and fungi sensing chemical substances, are usually in a distributed and redundant form. To carry out, it is extremely efficient and energy-saving. The decision-making process is often decentralized, and complex adaptive behaviors emerge based on simple rules. These principles can be transformed into algorithms, such as using multi-agent systems to simulate ant colony collaboration, or using evolutionary algorithms to optimize controller parameters to adapt to unknown environments. If we want our technical systems to have resilience, self-organization, and adaptive capabilities, rather than just rigid automation, we must learn natural control strategies.
How to use living organisms as smart sensors and actuators
Directly integrating living organisms into functional components of the system is the forefront of biophilic control. Biological organisms themselves are sophisticated sensors or reactors optimized by evolution. For example, research is exploring the use of networks of living fungal hyphae as distributed sensing computing units within buildings. These fungi can sense light in the environment, as well as pollutants, temperature and touch, and transmit this information through internal electrical signals. By interpreting these bioelectric signals, the system can automatically adjust lighting, temperature and humidity, achieving significant energy savings while improving the living experience. When the system reaches the end of its life, these biomaterials can also be disposed of in a more environmentally friendly manner.
Another eye-catching example is the "biohybrid system". Researchers use the coupling of robotic equipment and real plants to guide the natural growth behavior of plants. Plants have the ability to efficiently produce materials of specific shapes. Robots can provide expanded sensing and decision-making functions, build plant growth models through machine learning (such as LSTM networks), and then evolve robot controllers to guide plants to avoid obstacles and grow into specific forms. This achieves gentle and accurate "programming" of the growth process of living organisms, creating a new manufacturing and construction paradigm. Similarly, in the field of smart homes, there are smart green walls like this, which have automatic irrigation systems and light control systems. These two systems together form a closed-loop control system that can respond to the needs of plant life.
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How to implement biophilic controls in smart buildings to optimize energy efficiency
Integrating biophilic design with smart building control systems is an effective way to optimize building energy efficiency. The key to this integration is that biophilic elements (such as daylight, vegetation, natural ventilation) are not only sources of comfort, but also "energy assets" that can be quantified and regulated. For example, a smart green wall system (like the one in this project) is not only beautiful, but has a network of sensors that monitor soil moisture, light intensity, and ambient temperature. These data are linked with the building energy management system (BEMS) to achieve accurate automatic irrigation and light supplementation, minimizing the waste of water and electricity.
Going one step further, the biophilic control system can achieve dynamic and predictive adjustments. The system can learn the building's occupancy patterns, external weather conditions, and the transpiration of indoor plants, and then optimize the operation strategies of air conditioning and fresh air systems in advance. For example, in the morning, plant photosynthesis can be used to increase oxygen content and moderately reduce it. Temperature, in order to reduce the start-up investment of mechanical refrigeration, or use the greenhouse effect to store heat in winter. Studies have shown that just adjusting the heating or cooling temperature setting by 2°C can save about 10% of energy. By introducing more natural elements and more sophisticated biofeedback control methods, the energy-saving potential will become greater. The key to achieving the next generation of nearly zero-energy buildings is to seamlessly coordinate natural processes, such as plant transpiration and cooling, and daylighting, with the operation of energy-consuming systems such as HVAC and lighting.
How biophilic control systems can improve living environment and health
The core value of the biophilic control system is that it can systematically improve the quality of the living environment and have a positive effect on people's physical and mental health. This is not just adding a few extra pots of green plants, but using automated and intelligent adjustment of environmental parameters to create an atmosphere or scene suitable for human biological nature to form a space. According to research, when people are in contact with the natural environment, their heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormone levels will decrease. It can also help relieve mental fatigue, refocus attention, and help improve mood. Biophilic control systems are designed precisely to deliver these benefits stably.
The system can achieve this goal in a variety of ways. For example, it can automatically turn on the biofiltration function of specific plant walls based on the data fed back by the indoor air quality sensor, add humidity while removing volatile organic compounds, and dynamically adjust the color temperature and brightness of artificial lighting according to the user's schedule and natural light rhythms. degree, simulating the natural changes of sunrise and sunset, maintaining the stability of the body's biological clock. In the future, the system can even integrate data from wearable devices such as electroencephalography or heart rate monitoring to assess the user's stress or concentration status in real time, and automatically adjust the environment to a more soothing or work-friendly mode. This non-invasive environmental intervention with the help of biofeedback transforms the building from a passive container to an active "partner" in promoting health.
How to deal with complexity and uncertainty in biophilic control systems
The key difficulties encountered in constructing and operating biophilic control systems arise from the complexity, nonlinearity, and uncertainty of biological systems themselves. Unlike traditional industrial control objects, plants, fungi, or ecosystems are in dynamic change, and their behavior patterns are difficult to accurately express through simple mathematical equations. For example, controllers used to guide plant growth must face the "reality gap" problems caused by slow plant growth rates, individual differences, and environmental interference. Traditional optimization methods based on perfect foresight and steady-state assumptions often fail here.
To face these challenges, new methodologies are needed. There is a cutting-edge idea that adopts the "technology-ecology collaborative integrated design and control" framework. This framework constructs the operational control problem into a closed-loop model predictive control simulation, and uses Bayesian optimization to find design solutions that can minimize the whole life cycle cost. It recognizes the nature of dynamic changes in the ecosystem and also incorporates adaptive adjustment options into the control strategy. Another method is to fully rely on data-driven and machine learning. Using a large amount of experimental data to train recurrent neural networks such as LSTM can build a "forward model" that can predict biological dynamics, and evolve a robust controller based on this, which shows that the system must have the ability to continuously learn and adapt online.
How to transform biophilic design from idea to implementable technical solution
Transforming the concept of biophilia from an abstract principle into a concrete and implementable technical solution requires interdisciplinary "translation" work. First of all, the vague "natural experience" must be broken down into physical or psychological parameters that can be measured and controlled. For example, "connecting with nature" can be embodied in the following: ensuring that there is a certain proportion of natural elements in the field of view, maintaining a certain diversity of indoor plants, providing a soundscape where natural sounds can be heard, or creating an interface where natural materials can be touched. And these can all become control targets set by the system.
It is necessary to establish technical links that connect biological responses and device actions. This generally covers the perception layer, which is the monitoring environment and user status, the decision-making layer, which is the algorithm model, and the execution layer, which is the control device. Take Singapore's "super trees" or active walls, for example. They integrate automatic irrigation, rainwater recycling, solar energy utilization and microclimate adjustment functions, and then a whole set of sensor networks and logic controllers work together. Ultimately, successful solutions cannot lack consideration for user experience. Intervention technology should be concealed and elegant, such as understanding user intentions through eye tracking, or using natural interactive interfaces to understand user intentions, and then provide contextual support. The purpose is to make technology serve the natural experience, not to make complex operations a new burden. The true meaning of biophilic design is to use technology to reproduce the beneficial aspects of nature, rather than to show off the technology itself.
For those who want to introduce more natural elements into their living and working spaces, but are concerned about complicated maintenance and increased energy consumption, what do you think are the most urgent obstacles to solving the application of biophilic control systems? Is it the initial cost, the reliability of the technology, or the lack of mature products that are easy to integrate?
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