DIGIPROT integrates advanced robotics technologies, artificial intelligence techniques and digital modeling in order to reconstruct the energy model of an existing building and perform its energy evaluation and optimization.

The project proposes the use of autonomous robots (drones and rovers) equipped with cameras and sensors to collect geometric and thermal data from the interior of a pilot building. Once analyzed, through machine learning and computer vision algorithms, the data will be integrated into energy modeling software to reconstruct a digital twin of the real building with energy characteristics. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed protocol will be carried out in the final phases of the project by measuring the precision of the energy model fed without and with the digitally collected data.

The main challenge of the project and at the same time its greatest innovation is, through the automated integration of the data collected by robots in an energy model of the building, to develop a completely digitized protocol that can be replicated. Through this, it is intended to streamline and digitize the collection and processing of information, while improving its quality.

Operational speed can be essential when, for example, you want to energetically analyze a large number of buildings or an entire neighborhood. Furthermore, by minimizing the analog component compared to a conventional energy audit protocol, the proposed method can be iterated while maintaining the same validity and objectivity. This can be very advantageous when it is necessary to evaluate the impact of changes or transformations in the building (eg successively to an energy rehabilitation) or to compare the behavior of the building at different times and climatic conditions of the year (eg in summer and winter, on sunny days and on rainy days, with high or low occupancy).

Currently, it is not common to find an integrated application, like the one proposed in DIGIPROT, of robotics in the energy and building sectors and through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, for this reason the benefits that can be obtained taking advantage of it are still unknown. However, the potential offered by the integration of these technologies allows to open new future research scenarios to digitize the collection and processing of data and consequently to further refine the precision of the energy model of a building.