This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sensors and Actuators in Smart Cities" that was published in JSAN

The advent of integrated circuits, which became possible because of the tremendous progress in semiconductor technology, resulted in the low cost microprocessor. Thus if it is possible to design a low cost sensor which is silicon based then the overall cost of the control system can be reduced. We can have integrated sensors which has electronics and the transduction element together on one silicon chip. This complete system can be called as system-on-chip .The main aim of integrating the electronics and the sensor is to make an intelligent sensor, which can be called as smart sensor. Smart sensors then have the ability to make some decision. Physically a smart sensor consists of transduction element, signal conditioning electronic and controller/processor that support some intelligence in a single package. A smart sensor is a device that takes input from the physical environment and uses built-in compute resources to perform predefined functions upon detection of specific input and then process data before passing it on. Smart sensors enable more accurate and automated collection of environmental data with less erroneous noise amongst the accurately recorded information. These devices are used for monitoring and control mechanisms in a wide variety of environments including smart grids, battlefield reconnaissance, exploration and a great number of science applications. A smart actuator is the integrated actuator of all components such as motor, controller, sensors, and communication unit. The robot which is linked to a smart actuator can be assembled or disassembled and reconfigured. Therefore, there are increasing demands from industries for a smart sensor and actuator. Smart Actuation and Sensing Systems - Recent Advances and Future Challenges emphasizes on accomplishments in the area of Smart Actuators and Smart Sensors, to combine researchers and scientists from different fields into a single virtual room. The book hence reflects the multicultural nature of the field and will allow the reader to taste and appreciate different points of view, different engineering methods and different tools that must be jointly considered when designing and realizing smart actuation and sensing systems.

Sensors and actuators are used daily in countless applications to ensure more accurate and reliable workflows and safer environments. Many students and young engineers with engineering and science backgrounds often come prepared with circuits and programming skills but have little knowledge of sensors and sensing strategies and their interfacing.

Sensors are the front end devices for information acquisition from the natural and/or artificial world. Higher performance of advanced sensing systems is achieved by using various types of machine intelligence. Intelligent sensors are smart devices with signal processing functions shared by distributed machine intelligence.Typical examples of intelligent sensors are the receptors and dedicated signal processing systems of the human sensory systems. The most important job of information processing in the sensory system is to extract necessary information from the receptors signals and transmit the useful information to the brain. This dedicated information processing is carried out in a distributed manner to reduce the work load of the brain. The processing also lightens the load of signal transmission through the neural network, the capacity of which is limited.Although the performance of the receptors in our human sensory system is not always ideal and is frequently inferior to that of man-made sensors, the total performance is usually far superior to those of our technical sensing systems. The weak points of human receptors are masked by the information processing. This processing makes our sensory system adaptable to the environment and optimizes system performance.The basic idea of this book, which contains new computing paradigms, is that the most advanced intelligent sensing system is the human sensory system. Section I reviews the technologies of intelligent sensors and discusses how they developed. Typical approaches for the realization of intelligent sensors emphasizing the architecture of intelligent sensing systems are also described. In section II, fundamental technologies for the fabrication of intelligent sensors and actuators are presented. Integration and micro-miniaturization techniques are emphasized. Section III presents advanced technologies approaching human sensory systems, these technologies are not directly aimed at practical applications, but introduce the readers to the development of engineering models of sensory systems. Technologies of integrated intelligent sensors, which will shortly be in use are introduced in section IV. In section V, examples are given of intelligent sensing systems which are used in industrial installations. Hardware for machine intelligence is not integrated at present, but can soon be implemented in the monolithic integrated structure. Without this machine intelligence, new functions, for example, self diagnosis or defects identification, cannot be realized. This section also demonstrates the potential of intelligent sensors in industry. Section VI introduces two interesting topics which are closely related to intelligent sensing systems. The first one is multisensor fusion. It is expected to be one of the fundamental and powerful technologies for realizing an advanced intelligent sensing systems. The second is visualizing technology of the sensed states for easy comprehension of the dynamic multi-dimensional state. This is useful for intelligent man-machine interfaces.This book will be recognised by readers as a milestone in the rapid progress of intelligent sensors.

This book describes the technology used for effective sensing of our physical world and intelligent processing techniques for sensed information, which are essential to the success of Internet of Things (IoT). The authors provide a multidisciplinary view of sensor technology from materials, process, circuits, and big data domains and showcase smart sensor systems in real applications including smart home, transportation, medical, environmental, agricultural, etc. Unlike earlier books on sensors, this book provides a “global” view on smart sensors covering abstraction levels from device, circuit, systems, and algorithms.

This introductory compendium teaches engineering students how the most common electronic sensors and actuators work. It distinguishes from other books by including the physical and chemical phenomena used as well as the features and specifications of many sensors and actuators.The useful reference text also contains an introductory chapter that deals with their specifications and classification, a chapter about sensor and actuator networks, and a special topic dealing with the fabrication of sensors and actuators using microelectromechanical systems techniques (sensors and actuators on a chip). A set of exercises and six laboratory projects are highlighted.