Intelligent Remote Sensors: from Fields to Information

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Nineteenth century research established that fields are curvilinear, and as waves, travel in straight lines. Then Rutherford's experiments in New Zealand and Marconi's demonstration between Canada and Britain showed that waves travelled "around corners". A research frenzy ensued on propagation, spawning the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale (URSI). Over a century later, grand challenges still beckon in fields and waves, such as bioelectromagnetics, with progress still reported through URSI and other research organizations.  As the study of fields and waves led to radio communications, electrical engineering emerged from physics as a new discipline, and it now draws on many other disciplines from mathematics to materials science. In the twentieth century, Communications, and then Information, emerged also as transformative areas, culminating in today's Information and Communications Technology representing the most disruptive innovations that mankind has known. This research is on the design of sensors which transform between fields and information. The sensing element maps between fields and signals; and its signal processing maps signals and information, often called "intelligence". In practice, the sensing is the biting constraint because the signal quality limits the information. Various elements sense the various types of fields, in particular antennas for electromagnetic fields and loudspeakers/microphones for acoustic fields. An intelligent remote sensor has multiple sensor elements, or an array, enabling its signal processing to suppress unwanted signals while boosting the wanted signal and its information. Its design calls for several specialist engineering skills - conception, mathematical formulation, and development - including the evaluation of compact, wide-band elements and their array structures. On top of these, there is the signal theory and adaptive processing, plus the inseparable role of the propagation and its modelling, including "around the corner" mechanisms: to best map the information, the sensor must adapt to changing conditions, particularly the propagation. These diverse skills are required together, so innovation in sensor design calls on scientific foundations in the scattering of fields and waves, elements and arrays, signal processing, and the interplay between these. Evaluation is particularly important for engineering and is part of the research. The methodology is to develop sensors for a wide set of applications to invoke synergy. In communications, these are for the Internet-of-Things and satellite radar monitoring of earth resources; in bioelectromagnetics, discovering and using interactions between fields and micro-organisms, paving the way to radio disinfectants; and in acoustics, new immersive systems for interpreting diagnostic signals. The outcomes will be new design foundations and inventions, world class sensors and world class engineers, ultimately contributing to new economic wealth.