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Smart Control of Electric Lamp using Artificial

Intelligence based Controller

Conference Paper · December 2015

DOI: 10.1109/INDICON.2015.7443228

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 Smart Control of Electric Lamp using Artificial
Intelligence based Controller
Anupam Purwar Divya Joshi Mani Sankar Dasgupta
Visiting Scientist Student Member IEEE Professor
Department of Aerospace Department of Electrical & Department of Mechanical
Engineering, Electronics Engineering Engineering
Indian Institute of Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and
Bangalore, India Science, Pilani, India Science, Pilani, India
anupambitspilani@gmail.com f2010160@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in msdasgupta@gmail.com

Abstract— There is need and scope of controlling the power
consumed by conventional electric lamps in presence of some
natural light. An artificial intelligence based control system has
been developed to control a lamp dimmer circuit with
bidirectional triode thyristor. The light present in the room is
sensed and voltage supplied to the lamp is controlled by varying
the time constant of the circuit through change of resistance of a
multi-turn potentiometer with a stepper motor. The resistance set
in the lamp dimmer circuit is in accordance with signals from an
adaptive Neural Network running in MATLAB®. The artificial
neural network (ANN) runs in real time in MATLAB®
environment to control the time constant of the lamp dimmer
circuit for controlling of power consumption. Under test
conditions, energy savings up to 35% is achieved.
Keywords—adaptive control; energy saving; lamp dimmer;
target illuminance; artificial neural network; artificial intelligence.
I. INTRODUCTION
According to International Energy Agency, 19% of all
electricity produced is consumed in lighting [1]. The ever
growing lighting demand necessitates development of power
efficient devices. Some researchers attempted intelligent
switching of street lighting system based on localized
conditions [2, 3], recently work on dimmable outdoor lighting
system is also reported [4, 5]. Some researchers focused on
control of lamps for energy efficiency, for street lighting the
focus mainly were on ballast based control of sodium vapor
lamps [6] or Metal-halide lamps [7]. Comparative study on
LED ballasts for energy efficiency is also reported [8]. For
intelligent stage lighting, stepper motor controlled lighting
system with ARM based processor is reported [9] but this
system does not attempt energy saving. Wojnicki et. al. [10]
have proposed a conceptual frame work of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) based control system. But development of an
AI-based control system to reduce power consumption in
lamps and quantification of the same using real time
demonstration has not been reported.
This paper presents the design, development and
demonstration of a novel AI-based control system for reducing
power consumption in electric lamps. Artificial intelligence
systems have demonstrated to have high level decision making
and learning capabilities similar to human beings, which
cannot be programmed into conventional systems. This
provides higher flexibility and adaptability in AI based control
systems [11]. Hence, an AI based control system has been
designed to control the power consumed by lamp. The power
required by a lamp for a target illuminance level at a location
changes as naturally available light changes over time. Thus,
there is a scope to reduce electricity consumed by a lamp.
Natural lighting already available in a location of a room
is used as reference to achieve target illuminance. The AI
based control system has been developed and tested with a
setup consisting of a lux meter (input unit), microcontroller
(interfacing unit), lamp dimmer alternating current circuit,
stepper motor (illuminance control element) and trained
artificial neural network in MATLAB® environment
(processing unit) has been devised. To evaluate the
effectiveness of proposed system, comparison of power
consumption of the lamp operated with the proposed control
system is made with an ordinary lamp.
II. DESIGN OF CONTROL SYSTEM
Nonlinear processes are difficult to control because of
multiple variations of the nonlinear behaviour. The issue
becomes more complicated if a nonlinear characteristic, here
the light availability and corresponding artificial illumination
required in room changes with time during a day. So there is a
need for an adaptive control of power consumption in lamps.
Adaptive systems commonly employ methods of
computational intelligence such as artificial neural networks
(ANN) [12][13].

Fig.1. Lamp dimmer circuit

978-1-4673-6540-6/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE

 Fig.3. Relation between Illuminance and Resistance

calculates the final output value. The number of neurons

in hidden layer of network has been optimized to keep the
neural network simple and computationally fast [15][16].

A. ANN 1
The ANN-1 is designed and trained using data obtained
experimentally as shown in Fig.8. In ANN-1 the input layer is
taking the supply voltage reading, and output layer gives lamp
dimmer circuit resistance R as output. The architecture of this
ANN is shown in Fig. 2. This ANN does not form part of the
actual control system, but only relates voltage V, across lamp
with the resistance, R of lamp dimmer circuit.
B. ANN2
The data required for training this artificial neural network has
been generated in three steps. First, relation between
illuminance output of lamp and voltage supplied is established
experimentally as shown in Fig.7. Then, resistance, R of the
circuit for a required voltage, V supplied to lamp has been
found from ANN1. This provides the data relating deficient
Fig.2. Architecture of ANN1 illuminance L (Lux) and R (kΩ) which is used to train ANN-2
as shown in Fig.3.
The design goals of this ANN based control system are In ANN 2, the input layer is taking lux reading of
accurate modelling of the non-linear process and the constraint required light intensity and gives lamp dimmer circuit
is ease of implementation on a basic micro controller to resistance as output. The architecture of ANN-2 is shown in
minimize hardware costs. Another objective is testing of this Fig. 4. Hence, this neural network calculates lamp dimmer
control system with a lamp dimmer circuit. A lamp dimmer circuit resistance for a required light intensity level in
circuit [14] consisting of an incandescent bulb has been real time.
selected as shown in Fig.1. For this circuit, the voltage
supplied or power fed to the lamp is controlled by varying the
Resistance R, which in turn changes the triac T firing angle
and changes the voltage supplied to lamp. Hence, the control
system has to control the value of resistance R based on the
light requirement.
In first step, rigorous experiments have been carried out to
get data of natural light availability at different times during a
day and corresponding Resistance R required, then this
data has been used to train the ANN. Different number of
hidden layers and neurons have been used to accurately
model this nonlinear process, then complexity of ANN has
been minimized for easy implementation on a low cost
microcontroller. After rigorous optimization, a control
system with feed-forward ANN consisting of sigmoid hidden
neurons and linear output neurons has been selected.
The presented neural networks ANN-1 and ANN-2
consists of three layers: Input Layer, Hidden layer and Output
layer. In both the neural networks input is passed to four
neurons present in hidden layer, the hidden layer uses tan
sigmoid as the activation function and passes the values
to output layer where the outputs from four neurons are
aggregated and fed to a pure linear activation function, which
Fig.4. Architecture of ANN2

Fig.5. Curve Fit :Training performance of ANN1
Fig.6. Curve Fit :Training performance of ANN2
C. Training of Artificial Neural Network
The ANN-1 (Fig. 2) and ANN-2 (Fig. 4) have been trained
using Levenberg Marquardt Back Propagation Method
(LMBPM) owing to its higher efficiency as compared to other
training algorithms[17]. The training is carried out
multiple times till a satisfactory fit with mean square error of
the order of 10-2 is achieved. The accuracy of the fit
obtained using ANN-1 and ANN-2 is shown in Fig. 5
and Fig. 6 respectively.
III. EXPERIMENTATION
A. Experimental Setup
Variation of illuminance at a location is modeled by varying
the voltage supply to a 60 watt incandescent lamp using a
variac in a dark room, and the light intensity is recorded with a
digital lux meter kept at a fixed distance from the bulb. The
distance between lamp and lux meter is adjusted in a way that
the sensitivity range of the lux meter is well utilized and
accordingly luminance measured by lux meter is 250 lx for
220 Volt supply to the lamp. A lamp dimmer circuit is
constructed as shown in Fig. 1. Supply is 220 Volt 50 Hertz
Alternating Current, L is 60 watt incandescent lamp, R is 0 to
35 kilo ohm multi turn round potentiometer, C is 1 micro F
capacitor, D is 30V 1-2 Ampere Diac and T is 30V 5 Ampere
Triac. The voltage V across the lamp and corresponding
luminance reading in Lux at the target location has been
recorded as shown in Fig.7. Similarly by varying resistance R,
the corresponding output Voltage, V across the lamp is
recorded as shown in Fig. 8.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION
The developed control system has been implemented on
Advance RISC Machine (ARM) based microcontroller, for
interfacing the final control element, stepper motor and input
light sensor with a computer. The arrangement is shown in
block diagram in Fig 9. Light intensity L measured by lux
meter is input to the microcontroller, which is passed to
control system running in MATLAB[18] environment on
computer. The output from control system is sent to stepper
motor for setting particular resistance R in the multi-turn
potentiometer of the lamp dimmer circuit. Thus, the ANN2
running in real time reads the deficient light intensity L and
gives the corresponding value of R to be set for a target level
of illumination.
V. DISCUSSION
A modular design approach has been used to develop this AI
based control step, the three steps in the process of
construction of the ANN-2 essentially provide this modularity.
The Illuminance(Lux) vs. Voltage plot (Fig. 7) is dependent
upon place, light source and source to target distance;
which are local issues. The Voltage vs. Resistance plot (Fig.
8) is dependent upon the lamp dimmer circuit design.
ANN-1 provides the necessary method to find data
relating
Fig.7. Illuminance vs. Voltage
 is made about the power saving with the proposed
adaptive controller for lamp against a normal lamp without
controller. Using another 60 Watt lamp fitted in series with a
variac as an external source, the light intensity at the
measuring point in the dark room is varied from 0 to
250 lux in 25 steps, maintaining each light intensity level
for a constant interval of time. During the same, the 60
Watt lamp with adaptive controller is kept active and the
power consumption is recorded. This roughly simulates a
day long situation with variation in available natural
lighting. Overall for the full duration of the experiment
34.55% power saving is recorded as shown in Fig. 10. Power
consumed by stepper motor being less than 1.2 Watt is
neglected. Thus, this work demonstrates valuable saving of
Fig.8. Voltage vs. Resistance in lamp dimmer circuit
electricity with the developed control
system.

LIGHT SENSOR ARM 32 BIT PC WITH ANN

VI. CONCLUSION
(INPUT DEVICE) MICRO CONTROLLER
0-5 V ANALOG CONTROLLER RUNNING
In this work an AI-based control system has been designed
SIGNAL NXP LPC 1768 IN MATLAB and developed to reduce electricity consumption in
electric lamp. The same has been implemented using a
microcontroller and ANN running in MATLAB. Then, an
TIME CONSTANT STEPPER DC 12 V experiment is carried out to quantify the effectiveness of this
OF LAMP MOTOR DC
DIMMER CIRCUIT SUPPLY
12V, 0.1 Amp ANN- based controller in reducing electricity
consumption. In this experiment, natural light availability is
Fig.9. Block diagram of control system implementation
varied artificially and electricity saving of about 35 percent
has been observed. Thus, establishing the capability of AI-
based control system. The ANN can be retrained with
different set of data for different target lighting conditions and
hence this provides a promising solution to manage power
consumed in lamps installed in places like airport, factory,
long corridors etc. This smart control scheme can also be
used for dimming CFLs and LED lamps as well by
modifying the ANN according to their dimmer circuit and
thus aid in reducing electricity consumption in all types of
lamps. With similar logic, the work can also be extended to
other Alternating current devices like air conditioners, heating
Deficient illuminance in room (Lux) devices etc .

Fig.10. Graph showing power consumed by lamp (in W) vs. light intensity
required (in Lux) in the room
resistance, R for a required voltage. But the control
system consists of only ANN-2, which runs in real time
to control lamp dimmer circuit resistance, R according to
ambient light measured by light sensor.
Dimmers have been implemented in various illumination
control applications but they don't have fine control over
dimming. The motivation behind employing artificial neural
network is to obtain smart, smooth and adaptive control. The
entire control system is also affordable, whose major cost
consists of microcontroller available within INR 600.
The cost of entire system does not exceed INR 950, which
is cheaper than a large wattage dimmer. A comparative study
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