Artificial Olfactory Systems

An artificial olfactory system, referred to as an electronic nose, is developed to target the functionality of the human olfactory system. In order to obtain a performance comparable to its biological counterpart, researchers focus their efforts on two different paths. The first path leads to the fabrication of the sensor array in order to mimic the functionality of the olfactory sensory neurons in the biological olfactory system. The second path concentrates on the development of odor identification algorithms to hopefully achieve a similar classification performance to that of the human brain. This chapter presents a review of the sensor technologies and the odor classification algorithms used in electronic nose technology. A case study of microelectronic nose system characterization, containing an in-house fabricated gas sensor array, is also presented by acquiring signatures of three gases in a laboratory and comparing the performance of the gas identification algorithms on this experimentally obtained data set.