The development of intelligent sensors involves the design of reconfigurable systems capable of working with different input sensors signals. Reconfigurable systems should expend the least possible amount of time readjusting. A self-adjustment algorithm for intelligent sensors should be able to fix major problems such as offset, variation of gain and lack of linearity with good accuracy. This paper shows the performance of a progressive polynomial algorithm utilizing different grades of relative nonlinearity of an output sensor signal. It also presents an improvement to this algorithm which obtains an optimal response with minimum nonlinearity error, based on the number and selection sequence of the readjust points. In order to verify the potential of this proposed criterion, a temperature measurement system was designed. The system is based on a thermistor which presents one of the worst nonlinearity behaviors. The application of the proposed improved method in this system showed that an adequate sequence of the adjustment points yields to the minimum nonlinearity error. In realistic applications, by knowing the grade of relative nonlinearity of a sensor, the number of readjustment points can be determined using the proposed method in order to obtain the desired nonlinearity error. This will impact on readjustment methodologies and their associated factors like time and cost.

Abstract:The development of smart sensors involves the design of reconfigurable systems capable of working with different input sensors. Reconfigurable systems ideally should spend the least possible amount of time in their calibration. An autocalibration algorithm for intelligent sensors should be able to fix major problems such as offset, variation of gain and lack of linearity, as accurately as possible. This paper describes a new autocalibration methodology for nonlinear intelligent sensors based on artificial neural networks, ANN. The methodology involves analysis of several network topologies and training algorithms. The proposed method was compared against the piecewise and polynomial linearization methods. Method comparison was achieved using different number of calibration points, and several nonlinear levels of the input signal. This paper also shows that the proposed method turned out to have a better overall accuracy than the other two methods. Besides, experimentation results and analysis of the complete study, the paper describes the implementation of the ANN in a microcontroller unit, MCU. In order to illustrate the method capability to build autocalibration and reconfigurable systems, a temperature measurement system was designed and tested. The proposed method is an improvement Sensors 2007, 7 1510 over the classic autocalibration methodologies, because it impacts on the design process of intelligent sensors, autocalibration methodologies and their associated factors, like time and cost.

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