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Now in its third edition, Understanding Smart Sensors is the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative summary of the latest applications and developments impacting smart sensors in a single volume. This thoroughly expanded and revised edition of an Artech bestseller contains a wealth of new material, including critical coverage of sensor fusion and energy harvesting, the latest details on wireless technology, the role and challenges involved with sensor apps and cloud sensing, greater emphasis on applications throughout the book, and dozens of figures and examples of current technologies from over 50 companies. This edition provides you with knowledge regarding a broad spectrum of possibilities for technology advancements based on current industry, university and national laboratories R & D efforts in smart sensors. Updated material also identifies the need for trusted sensing, the efforts of many organizations that impact smart sensing, and more.

Various sensing technologies are used today for collision avoidance, blind spot detection, and other vision enhancing systems in luxury vehicles. These sensing technologies include radar, lidar, infrared, and ultrasonic sensing as well as CCD and CMOS imaging and, in most cases, require intensive and sophisticated computing capability to implement. Turning these systems and those still in the development phase into standard or optional features on mid-range vehicles will require performance enhancements and considerable cost reduction. However, affordable vehicle systems that anticipate accidents and allow the driver and/or the vehicle itself to avoid them could provide one of the most remarkable vehicle safety advances. This paper will review automotive industry goals and objectives for vision-based systems and present the electronics industries’ current and projected capability to meet these demands.

The transition of the vehicle from mechanical to mechatronics systems is encountering some technology tollbooths. The increasing number and level of vehicle electrical loads cannot be met with the existing automotive electrical system and will eventually require the vehicle's primary voltage to increase to 42V to minimize current, copper cost, wiring harness size and weight, and even di/dt. At the same time, the increasing power requirements for newer loads that range from 1 to 20kW limit the use of existing semiconductor techniques to control these loads. Automakers have already started to implement or plan for the changes in the vehicle's architecture. Automotive electronic suppliers have designed systems to provide power management. However, non-automotive systems that are in production may have features that could be emulated in the automotive environment. Adapting the behaviors of other industries could also provide benefits of reduced time to market as well.