ABSTRACT
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1.2 General Concepts Sensing is the process of getting information from the environment, constituting a basic functionality of a complex system, either a machine or a biological entity, with the knowledge acquired from its surrounding, triggering and guiding its internal operation to a level compatible with the external conditions, or eventually initiating actuation steps toward their modication. e technological progress and the fast development of intelligent systems inevitably require an increasingly eective and reliable sensing technology. is process has three steps: in the rst step, the sensing element, also called the sensing head, interacts with the environment and is being aected by its environment, which causes a change on some characteristics of the sensing element; the second step is the transmission of raw information about these changes to a processing unit; and in the nal step, raw information will be analyzed depending on the sensing mechanism and application. Most notably, biological sensing systems well illustrate this three-step process, as is the case for our vision system. In this system, the eye is the sensing head with its adjustable focal length lens to form an image of the outside scene on the retina, which contains photosensitive elements (rods and cones) that convert light into electrical impulses; the transmission channel is the optic nerve, which is the route by which these impulses are sent to the brain to be processed.
