A Nervous System for Sensors

In the past twenty years, we’ve seen amazing advances in sensors of many varieties. We have sophisticated optical sensors in our smartphones, and LIDAR is commonplace in automobiles with assisted driving capabilities. Likewise, the MatrixSpace Radar, announced in 2023, represents a compelling new price/performance/size offering that is already bringing radar sensors to entirely new applications, including many that have never used a radar before.

For all these advances in sensor technology and affordability, there still are very few examples of how groups of sensors in outdoor environments become really useful to people. Consider the case of optical security cameras, which is nearly a $30B per year industry today. These cameras are very useful to record information at short range and in daylight, but mainly to look at what was recorded long after it happened.

That’s useful, but not that useful unless you have a person staring at the camera input all the time and paying attention. Automotive radar is useful, but only for very short distances and they don’t talk to each other. Consider how helpful it would be if they could – a car detecting a hazard could tell all the other cars around it to watch out.

We believe that giving people the ability to precisely sense what is happening in outdoor environments, and to offer that information in a simple, intuitive way to teams of people, will dramatically change many large industries. Top of that list are all manner of safety and security applications.

There’s no company that we know of that is attempting to tackle this sensor problem in this holistic fashion, which is why we formed MatrixSpace in 2020.  We believe that sensor technology of all forms will continue to advance in decades to come, but we decided a few years ago that radar technology wasn’t advancing quickly enough for a new market segment of low cost, lightweight radars – so we invented it.

The next step is even more fun. Now we get to take large numbers of outdoor sensors and give them the capabilities to combine their information in such a way that real time sensing and actions are dramatically improved for the people using them.

To make that work, a very difficult series of technical problems need to be solved.  But first, let’s remind ourselves that the best sensor fusion machine around is the human brain.

Our brains take multiple sensor inputs (two eyes, two ears, and the rest of our senses) and combine these in a way that it seems like one sensory experience to us. We don’t see two different views from our eyes. We also use this sensor fusion every day, such as hearing something and then turning our heads to look at what we heard. The combination of all this complex information allows us to make very rapid decisions on what is around us, and what we should do to react.

So creating great new sensors is very necessary, but it’s not enough. To extend this model of human senses to the outdoors, we must also create a nervous system that connects all of these sensors, and make them seem to a user like they are looking at one big sensor. That’s actually really hard to do across wide areas, but then we like really big challenges.

Stay tuned for more on the first sensor nervous system. Then we’ll talk about how we use the machine equivalent of our brains (Artificial Intelligence at the EDGE) to use all of that interesting sensor information to help us make decisions in real time.

Learn more at MatrixSpace Radar and AI Sensing.