Soft Sensors for Estimating Laundry Weight in Household Heat Pump Tumble Dryers

The laundry weight of the loaded in the drum of a laundry treatment machine is an important piece of information; laundry weight can be used to set various washing/drying cycle parameters and to optimize performances and efficiency. Unfortunately, dedicated weight sensors cannot be included in consumer laundry equipment given the related costs. For this reason, we present in this work a soft sensor approach for estimating laundry weight based on sensors already in place in a laundry treatment equipment; in particular, we consider here a heat pump tumble dryer as case study. The proposed soft sensor is based on regularization, a popular approach in Machine Learning to provide models without overfitting the training data. Different studies are provided in this work, by considering different constrains on timing and complexity of the Soft Sensor solution. The developed Soft Sensors have been tested on laboratory data provided by an industrial partner.