Sniff This Out, Robot

One of the prime senses that used to set humans apart from robots was the sense of smell. A human being could smell food that had gone rancid, while a robot could not. The sense of smell did not have a sensor available. However the researchers at the Kyushu University in Japan are hoping to break through this restriction.

These researchers are working on robots that can rapidly detect odors with the same ease a bloodhounds. The breed of dogs which is well known for it’s ability to sniff out odors that even the human nose can not detect. The ongoing research has been working on robots being able to detect odors from the ground, a footprint, and even read a message which has been written on the ground using odors as a barcode.

Needless to say that this two decades old research is truly phenomenal. The researchers base their  odor sensor on a technique called Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance or LSPR. Basically what it does is to measure the changes in the light absorption of gold nano particles which have been exposed to a gas. They then compare this to a list of data already collected earlier in the science project and determine what the odor could be.