Ratiometric Decoding of Pheromones for a Biomimetic Infochemical Communication System

Wei, Guangfen; Thomas, Sanju; Cole, Marina; Rácz, Zoltán; Gardner, Julian

Abstract

Biosynthetic infochemical communication is an emerging scientific field employing molecular compounds for information transmission, labelling, and biochemical interfacing; having potential application in diverse areas ranging from pest management to group coordination of swarming robots. Our communication system comprises a chemoemitter module that encodes information by producing volatile pheromone components and a chemoreceiver module that decodes the transmitted ratiometric information via polymer-coated piezoelectric Surface Acoustic Wave Resonator (SAWR) sensors. The inspiration for such a system is based on the pheromone-based communication between insects. Ten features are extracted from the SAWR sensor response and analysed using multi-variate classification techniques, i.e., Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), and Multilayer Perception Neural Network (MLPNN) methods, and an optimal feature subset is identified. A combination of steady state and transient features of the sensor signals showed superior performances with LDA and MLPNN. Although MLPNN gave excellent results reaching 100% recognition rate at 400 s, over all time stations PNN gave the best performance based on an expanded data-set with adjacent neighbours. In this case, 100% of the pheromone mixtures were successfully identified just 200 s after they were first injected into the wind tunnel. We believe that this approach can be used for future chemical communication employing simple mixtures of airborne molecules.

Citation

Wei, G., Thomas, S., Cole, M., Rácz, Z., & Gardner, J. (2017). Ratiometric Decoding of Pheromones for a Biomimetic Infochemical Communication System. Sensors, 17(11), Article 2489. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17112489

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 20, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Oct 30, 2017
• Publication Date: Oct 30, 2017
• Deposit Date: Nov 14, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 14, 2017
• Journal: Sensors
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 11
• Article Number: 2489
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s17112489