【How electrification and autonomous driving are expanding the role of sensor technologies within automotive designs】

The automotive production landscape is changing. The proliferation of electronic devices and sensors in modern car design has grown exponentially in recent years. It will expand further as the industry continues its transition toward e-mobility and autonomous driving. The core technologies featured in electric vehicles expand the realm into which sensors are deployed. Also, combustion engine vehicle gas sensors have shifted away from exhaust gas monitoring toward internal air quality (IAQ) measurement.

TDK offers a full suite of sensors that are perfectly suited for drones of all types from consumer/prosumer models to industrial units.
 
In just a few years, drones have become indispensable in one application after another, including such diverse areas as agriculture, real estate and cinematography. For all this success, drones still have almost unlimited potential given their suitability for a wide variety of uses including delivery, inspection, search & rescue, monitoring, and mapping, to name just a few.
 
Fundamental to drone utility is sensor technology. Drones rely on diverse sets of sensors for two broad purposes. First for their own functionality, notably flight and navigation, and second, for their ancillary capabilities – cameras for vision, motion detectors to sense activity, heat sensors to detect temperature, and so on.

Service robots play an increasingly vital role in society, from transportation and warehouse logistics to home entertainment and security. Regardless of their application, they need to sense changes in their surroundings in real-time to ensure safety while providing a positive user experience. To illustrate how various sensor technologies from TDK’s SmartSensor family can be applied in service robots, this article focuses on a robotic vacuum cleaner (RVC).
Early versions of robotic vacuums had very little intelligence, randomly bumping their way around the home and sometimes missing areas as they did not know where they had been. Often, they would unwittingly become trapped or run out of charge mid-sweep. And, as their dust box is comparatively small to a regular vacuum cleaner, if full, they could be sweeping but not collecting anything up. Over the years, with the innovative use of sensors and motor controllers, vacuum cleaning robots have become much smarter, overcoming these issues.