Artificial scent detection: News on the Robo-Nose

by Jay Salomon

In the six years since Taipan first brought you word of mechanical proboscides, you might say that the
artificial noses themselves have had a nose job. We believe that the leader in the field now is Alpha MOS, a public company located in France and the United States and traded on the Paris stock exchange.

Despite hefty price tags—noses of the non-human variety go for between US$25,000 and US$100,000—their
sniffers are widely used. Industrial users find the
investment pays off in about six months. These noses sans nostrils are most widely employed for sniffing in the food industry, perfumes, and packaging, with the remainder in miscellaneous other fields, especially government. Quality control is their main task at present, but other, more futuristic applications are already envisioned.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say you want to analyze a cup of coffee. The human nose recognizes the smell and sends the “data” to the brain, where neurons compare the odors to others stored in memory and recognize the coffee as “Brazilian.” The E-nose takes raw signals from the coffee, digitizes them, and compares them in its own “neural networks” to stored data; finally, the input is similarly recognized as “Brazilian.”

The nose knows

At the present time, 80% of the Alpha MOS noses are used for quality control in labs and 20% in research and development. A full 50% are found in the food industry, 15% in perfumes and cosmetics, 15 % in
packaging and polymers, and 20% in other applications. If you’re looking for futuristic uses, try this one: an E-nose at a crime scene detects body odors and “fingerprints” them for matching with possible perps.

One of the most exciting applications of the Alpha MOS nose is in research, where the mechanical smellers can instantly make judgments that used to take panels of consumers many months and many dollars. The E-nose programs the preferences of earlier panels into its memory and projects human reactions without the further need for humans.

And don’t think this company stops at the nose. It has now begun the manufacture of E-tongues, which follow the same principles. Best of all, these tongues only wag when ordered to do so. They taste… but never talk!

Alpha MOS can do the important work of that animal with the famous nose, but neither slobbers nor stinks up the workplace. Many would gladly trade their four-legged friend for the antiseptic, always-reliable robotic hound.