Sensor Industry News Brief

North American Smart Sensors Market (Date Published: 21 Jul 2004)

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, North American Smart Sensors Market, reveals that this market generated revenues worth $434.2 million in 2003, which is forecast to reach $635.2 million in 2010.

Smart sensors are nowadays being integrated with industrial systems, leaving behind a large pool of legacy systems that are unsuitable for installation of smart sensor systems. This is restraining the growth of the smart sensors market in North America. Had this large base of existing legacy systems been ‘open’ to smart sensor installations, the growth could have been explosive. Hence, the challenge for participants lies in finding suitable solutions that can boost integration of newly installed smart sensors into existing legacy systems. Tier one sensor companies, with their ability to commit substantial resources for R&D, can play a major role in overcoming this challenge.

Smart digital sensors are steeply priced – almost twice the price of analog sensors – and the cost of installation is extremely high, especially in case of in-plant installations. The exorbitant costs are primarily due to the type of specialized components that are used in their design (includes digital components, transducers, and microprocessors) and the kind of applications they are used for. Additionally, most smart sensor units are fitted with digital data output units, further raising price levels.

IEEE Approves 1451.4 Plug-And-Play Standard

IEEE 1451.4, "Standard for a Smart Transducer Interface for Sensors and Actuators - Mixed-Mode Communication Protocols and Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) Formats," creates a universal system for the essential information digital networks need to identify, characterize, interface with and use signals from analog sensors.

The standard takes advantage of EEPROM chips embedded in sensors to house and communicate details needed for plug-and-play capability. Manufacturers obtain identifiers for chips from the Internet (this site is currently being created). A complete TEDS may contain sections for identification and properties for a type of sensor, such as accelerometer, microphone, strain gage, thermocouple, thermistor and many others. The TEDS may also contain a calibration template for the sensor.

This book, published by SPIE -The International Society for Optical Engineering, describes the benefits of sensor fusion as illustrated by considering the characteristics of infrared, microwave, and millimeter-wave sensors, including the influence of the atmosphere on their performance, sensor system application scenarios that may limit sensor size but still require high resolution data, and the attributes of data fusion architectures and algorithms. The data fusion algorithms discussed in detail include classical inference, Bayesian inference, Dempster-Shafer evidential theory, artificial neural networks, voting logic as derived from Boolean algebra expressions, fuzzy logic, and detection and tracking of objects using only passively acquired data. A summary is presented of the information required to implement each of the data fusion algorithms discussed.

Weather forecasting, Earth resource surveys that use remote sensing, vehicular traffic management, target classification and tracking, military and homeland defense, and battlefield assessment are some of the applications that will benefit from the discussions of signature-generation phenomena, sensor fusion architectures, and data fusion algorithms provided in this text (Editorial Review)

ISBN: 0819454354

Hardcover: 342 pages

Price: $75.00

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ISBN: 0199638462

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Price: $164.50

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