The senses are how we know about reality. Autonomous systems (Robots) will be THE technology of the 3rd Millennium. Robots can see and hear, but they cannot smell or taste yet.

Why would we want them to? Without these senses they cannot truly know what is real and help us deal with it. More precisely, smell informs us about threats, anything from spoiled food to explosives to toxic gas.

You’ve probably seen dogs sniffing for contraband or bombs. More recently there are claims about dogs smelling diseases such as SARS-Covid19. Dogs have an incredible sense of smell, but they are not the ideal tools for these tasks. They must be laboriously trained to ‘alert’ on particular scents. They can be confused by other smells. They get tired and bored and can only do smell work a couple of hours per day. They are strongly influenced by their handler. They don’t know how much of something is in the air. They cannot communicate much beyond “I smell the thing I was trained for!”.

We have a better way. Imagine a laptop-sized device that can monitor the air continuously, 24/7/365, and send data to a server. Now imagine 1000 such devices in a metropolitan area. Imagine the signals can clearly measure amounts of thousands of compounds in the air. A map could be made of the area, allowing pinpoint location of odorants, fumes, toxic gas, ozone, pollutants, emissions and other chemicals in the air.