PhD position Tiny smart e-nose for fine-grid early detection of crop infestation - system integration

Electronic noses (e-noses) have a wide range of applications in agri-/horticultural, food, environmental, medical, industrial, smart home, and homeland security domains. However, state-of-the-art e-noses are typically built from a few discrete gas sensors, connected to separate read-out, A/D, control, and I/O electronics. They are inflexible, large, power-hungry and expensive. This severely limits their use for continuous fine-grid monitoring of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in mobile (drones, robots), hand-held, and disposable devices.

A fully integrated low-power/-area smart e-nose with many late-definable parallel “odor channels” and embedded signal processing would solve these issues and enable a variety of novel applications in a cost-effective way.

In this project, you will research, develop and test:

• A low-power tiny smart e-nose system based on a novel CMOS-based multi-sensor peripheral, embedded in a microcontroller (MCU), and functionalized for simultaneous detection of mixtures of VOCs.
• Tiny portable test boards and software for laboratory and field tests, and data collection.
• Embedded signal processing and machine learning algorithms, to interpret the sensor data.

You will also:

• Participate in field tests and demonstrations.
• Collect and investigate data for training machine learning algorithms.
• Publish results in/at high-impact journals and conferences

The e-nose will enable early detection of diseases, and pest infestation of plants, to:

• Prevent crop failure and food spoilage.
• Reduce use of pest control chemicals.
• Stop deforestation (to replace infested fields and plantations).

In this multidisciplinary project you will collaborate closely with the faculty 3mE (Precision and Microsystems Engineering department), and with industrial project partners.

Website and references:

http://bioelectronics.tudelft.nl /

http://pme.tudelft.nl/dmn