My name is Hui Cheng, I’m Corporate Vice President & Chief Scientist at Seedland Group.

In this article, I'm going to discuss our effort in developing AI-enabled smart homes and smarter community technologies.

Here are our main talking points:

Let’s go ahead and dive in. 👇

Introduction to Seedland

Seedland was founded in Guangzhou in 2006 as a real estate developer. Today, Seedland’s business has expanded much beyond real estate to a variety of sectors, one of which is smart home and smart community technology products and service areas.

Over the last 14 years, we've dedicated ourselves to improving people's lives through innovative technologies. We also redefine the relationship between people and their living spaces by integrating technologies with local culture and artfully designed buildings and communities.

Seedland has grown into a company that provides comprehensive solutions across the entire lifecycle of smart living.

Integrated residential development

Seedland not only provides houses and buildings, but also integrated residential development focusing on the needs of households of today and tomorrow.

It's quite common in China for a residential community to have hundreds or even thousands of people living in it. Therefore, it’s a great opportunity to provide integrated community services, such as on-site retail stores, healthcare, and recreational facilities.

It’s also a chance to develop and deploy state-of-the-art technologies for home and the community’s applications.

AI-driven value creation

As we all know, AI has become the most important driver for today's new technologies. It has been estimated that the value created by AI across sectors could be as high as three to six trillion dollars.

Smart homes have also become a fast-growing market sector. Over the next five years, the annual growth rate is estimated to be as high as almost 25%. China, Japan, and South Korea have the largest market potential in the APAC area.

Smart living enabled by AI

We categorize the smart home and smart community technology areas into three stages:

  • Digitization: The physical environment and home appliances, together with people and their activities are captured in a digital form. People's living spaces and their home appliances can be understood, analyzed, and controlled by computers.
  • Automation: Enables computers and robots to complete complex daily tasks/chores.
  • Democratization: All smart technology systems and devices can be made available and affordable for everyone who wants this technology.

Smart home IoT devices

Seedland and its strategic partners have developed a suite of smart IoT devices for the home. For example, the Smart Lock can use fingerprint and facial recognition to allow residents to go into their apartments. Users can remotely access the status of the lock, and find out whether or not they locked the door.

The system can automatically lock the door to make sure that the home is safe and secure.

In the living room, smart Wi-Fi, smart outlet, and also smart home gateway monitor the energy usage (including electricity, gas, water, and also Internet services).

The Smart nightstand can be used for wireless charging, together with a smart speaker for the bedroom. There are smart sensors on the bed that can capture and monitor how people sleep overnight. Those sensors can work together with smart lighting and smart curtains integrated to achieve the best results and experience for the users.

For example, if you want to sleep in during the weekend the sensors can understand people's behaviors as well as patterns to choose the best control of home appliances.

In the bathroom, there are smart mirrors that not only can show a very sharp reflection of the user, but also can display useful information such as makeup tips, videos on makeup how-tos, or advice on outfits.

Safety is our top concern so there are also four detection and warning sensors that can automatically detect a fall and call for help, which are designed for seniors who want to live an independent life.

Of course, there are Home control panels that display all the statistics and the usage of different appliances (including controls and a set of policies for Smart Home appliances).

Smart living autonomous system

The IoT devices deployed throughout the house enables us to also develop the next stage of devices and systems, which we call as a whole ‘Smart Living Autonomous Systems’. For the autonomous system platform, we focus on four different areas:

  • Multi-modal self-aware sensing: This’ll not only use multiple modalities to sense the people and the environment, but also design self-awareness into the sensor itself. It can be more robust and self-aware of its performance and any potential problem with a sensing system in itself.
  • Knowledge-based and also data-driven PnC (planning under control)
  • Smart HMI (human-machine interface), including a simulation environment: Enables the system to interact with people efficiently and intuitively.
  • Computational and social robotics: We designed robotic systems that not only use comprehensive computational tools, but also social awareness. Especially in a home and community environment, we want to make sure that robots are not only smart but also polite, follow social norms, and interact with people.

Skill-based and data-driven planning

For the planning part, we’re developing skill-based robotics to address several challenges, especially in the household environment. It’s complex, as well as diverse because domestic tasks have a wider range of needs which are different from robots in a manufacturing or warehouse environment.

Home Service robots need to act intuitively with people. The progress we’ve made in robotics today means we can always adapt the workflow to make robotic operations smoother and more efficient for manufacturing, warehouse and logistics, and retail store environments.

However, in a home environment, it’s very difficult to change human behaviors, especially in their homes, so it adds additional challenges to how we're going to design the behavior of the robots for them to be accepted and interact smoothly with people.

Essentially, simple and rigid robot actions cannot satisfy the needs associated with the household environment.

As a solution to these challenges, we’re proposing and developing a robot-skill database that has a range of manipulation capabilities but also has navigation capabilities (like searching or navigating in the home).

When there’s a task, we want to use goal-centric and knowledge-based task decomposition and planning.

We’re also developing capabilities of data-driven self-adaptation functions through machine learning, including DRL (deep reinforcement learning) to adapt and improve, and to further optimize the behaviors.

Skill-based robot platform

As shown above, the system will use the goal and decompose it based on the sensing of that environment in order to select a proper skill set, combine them, evaluate them, and finally, execute the best strategies to achieve the desired effect.

Examples of robotic systems

A Know Smart Kitchen includes a robot coffee machine. We’re also developing cooking robots that use recipes to cook a dish.

Another home robot we have is called the ‘Hachi Bingo’. This is a home robot specialized in health monitoring and remote actions like video conferencing and remote monitoring.

The robot itself already has a set of health monitoring devices and can automatically record vital signs and health-related data in the system and through facial recognition, it can record data for different people in the residence.

It can also remind people to take their medicine, both based on the schedule or remotely as well as check if the medicine has been taken or not. It can provide remote monitoring and moving capabilities to remotely control the robot in different areas with video conferencing and remote interaction.

Integrated community services

Seedland provides a wide range of integrated community services such as what we call JoyHealth, which is a community health service that focuses on prevention but also provides emergency services with a five minutes guarantee response for residents.

Hachi Auto - Autonomous community shuttle

Another robotic system we have is Hachi Auto which is an autonomous community shuttle service within our development. It has a very modern design with wide windows so people inside can enjoy the view while traveling within the community, it also has air conditioning and a built-in stereo.

In terms of security, it’s equipped with security sensors and fully insured. It also uses face recognition and voice-UI for easy access.

Smart life system

In addition to all the different community services Seedland produces, we're also developing an integrated system we call ‘Smart Life System’ which provides both OneID and OneService to integrate all the services.

It includes the Over-The-Air (OTA) update that upgrades software and algorithms including new technologies in order to provide a better experience.

For example, OneID enables zero-contact surveys and transactions throughout the community, and OneService is integrated into all the community services in order to achieve a better user experience.

The system has been installed in many of our communities and the active users are constantly growing.

Our mission is to deliver customer satisfaction and pride!

Among our communities, we’ve conducted a number of polls and research on how to achieve customer satisfaction and the level of satisfaction.

On the basic level, customers are looking for safety, a healthy living environment, and convenience. The next level is comfort, a beautiful environment that is harmonious and the highest level is all mentioned, but also the pride of living in this community and enjoying all the services and technologies provided in this integrated community service.

We’re striving to achieve the highest level of customer experience through quality, technology, and design, all combined.

This article was originally published as a presentation at the AI Accelerator Festival APAC, 2021. The talk was by Hui Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Chief Scientist at Seedland Group. Catch up on all presentations with our OnDemand feature.