A Drosophila-inspired intelligent olfactory biomimetic sensing system for gas recognition in complex environments

The olfactory sensory system of Drosophila has several advantages, including low power consumption, high rapidity and high accuracy. Here, we present a biomimetic intelligent olfactory sensing system based on the integration of an 18-channel microelectromechanical system (MEMS) sensor array (16 gas sensors, 1 humidity sensor and 1 temperature sensor), a complementary metal‒oxide‒semiconductor (CMOS) circuit and an olfactory lightweight machine-learning algorithm inspired by Drosophila. This system is an artificial version of the biological olfactory perception system with the capabilities of environmental sensing, multi-signal processing, and odor recognition. The olfactory data are processed and reconstructed by the combination of a shallow neural network and a residual neural network, with the aim to determine the noxious gas information in challenging environments such as high humidity scenarios and partially damaged sensor units. As a result, our electronic olfactory sensing system is capable of achieving comprehensive gas recognition by qualitatively identifying 7 types of gases with an accuracy of 98.5%, reducing the number of parameters and the difficulty of calculation, and quantitatively predicting each gas of 3-5 concentration gradients with an accuracy of 93.2%; thus, these results show superiority of our system in supporting alarm systems in emergency rescue scenarios.