Sensors I Didn’t See Coming
At a Glance
Sensing technologies that were the stuff of science fiction a few decades ago are now appearing daily in the real world.
We already have force-torque sensors for robots and night vision systems for cars.
And now a new development allows a single CMOS sensor to capture a regular image and a 3D point cloud.
It’s no secret that I love science fiction. I’ve been reading it since I was a lad. What's amazing me is that things that were literally the stuff of science fiction when I was young are now appearing in the real world on a daily basis.
As one simple example, I remember circa 1975 when I was about 18 years old and microprocessors were starting to make their presence felt. For some reason I was mulling the problems of traffic congestion (possibly I was sitting in a traffic jam). I was thinking that it would be awesome if there were some way to track all the cars on all the roads in England (which is where I hail from). That way, if it were detected that a lot of cars were travelling slowly or even stopped in the middle of the road, signs mounted above the roads could advise other cars approaching from the rear to take alternate routes.
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