Proceedings Article | 17 May 2013
Proc. SPIE. 8763, Smart Sensors, Actuators, and MEMS VI
KEYWORDS: Data modeling, Sensors, Polymers, Data processing, Receptors, Chemical elements, Neurons, Polymeric sensors, Chemical fiber sensors, Olfactory system
Biological olfaction outperforms chemical instrumentation in specificity, response time, detection limit, coding capacity,
time stability, robustness, size, power consumption, and portability. This biological function provides outstanding
performance due, to a large extent, to the unique architecture of the olfactory pathway, which combines a high degree of
redundancy, an efficient combinatorial coding along with unmatched chemical information processing mechanisms. The
last decade has witnessed important advances in the understanding of the computational primitives underlying the
functioning of the olfactory system. EU Funded Project NEUROCHEM (Bio-ICT-FET- 216916) has developed novel
computing paradigms and biologically motivated artefacts for chemical sensing taking inspiration from the biological
olfactory pathway. To demonstrate this approach, a biomimetic demonstrator has been built featuring a large scale sensor
array (65K elements) in conducting polymer technology mimicking the olfactory receptor neuron layer, and abstracted
biomimetic algorithms have been implemented in an embedded system that interfaces the chemical sensors. The
embedded system integrates computational models of the main anatomic building blocks in the olfactory pathway: the
olfactory bulb, and olfactory cortex in vertebrates (alternatively, antennal lobe and mushroom bodies in the insect). For
implementation in the embedded processor an abstraction phase has been carried out in which their processing
capabilities are captured by algorithmic solutions. Finally, the algorithmic models are tested with an odour robot with
navigation capabilities in mixed chemical plumes
