A toolbox of virtual instruments for laboratory electronic nose applications

Electronic noses are complex systems built around an array of chemical sensors and designed to mimic the human olfactory system in a wide area of applications. Such systems, and in particular those designed for research applications, utilize a large number of sub-systems for chemical sampling control, for signal generation and acquisition, and for data manipulation. The activity of each sub-system must be strictly synchronized with the activity of the other systems, and a repetitive set-up is often required. This paper describes a toolbox of virtual instruments developed for research purposes and based on a laboratory electronic nose including commercial instrumentation and custom electronics. The toolbox consists of several virtual instruments, allowing the implementation of the different measurement techniques that are commonly used in this research field. What follows describes an integrated system that automatically controls the composition of the mixture under analysis, provides set-up for both the instrumentation and the custom electronics, and performs the selected class of algorithms for feature extraction, data dimensionality reduction and classification.