A smart transducer is an analog or digital transducer

Transducer

A transducer is a device that converts one type of energy to another. Energy types include electrical, mechanical, electromagnetic , chemical, acoustic or thermal energy. While the term transducer commonly implies the use of a sensor/detector, any device which converts energy can be considered a...

 or actuator

Actuator

An actuator is a type of motor for moving or controlling a mechanism or system. It is operated by a source of energy, usually in the form of an electric current, hydraulic fluid pressure or pneumatic pressure, and converts that energy into some kind of motion. An actuator is the mechanism by which...

 combined with a processing unit and a communication interface.

As sensors and actuators become more complex they provide support for various modes of operation and interfacing. Some applications require additionally fault-tolerance and distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

. Such high-level functionality can be achieved by adding an embedded microcontroller

Microcontroller

A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a typically small amount of RAM...

 to the classical sensor/actuator, which increases the ability to cope with complexity at a fair price.

In the machine vision

Machine vision

Machine vision is the process of applying a range of technologies and methods to provide imaging-based automatic inspection, process control and robot guidance in industrial applications. While the scope of MV is broad and a comprehensive definition is difficult to distil, a "generally accepted...

 field, a single compact unit which combines the imaging functions and the complete image processing functions is often called a smart sensor.

See also

• IEEE 1451
  IEEE 1451
  IEEE 1451 is a set of smart transducer interface standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Instrumentation and Measurement Society’s Sensor Technology Technical Committee that describe a set of open, common, network-independent communication interfaces for...
  
  
• Transducer electronic data sheet
  Transducer Electronic Data Sheet
  A Transducer Electronic Data Sheet is a standardized method of storing transducer identification, calibration, correction data, and manufacturer-related information...
  
  
• TransducerML
  Transducerml
  TransducerML or TML is an Open Geospatial Consortium standard developed to describe any transducer in terms of a common model, including characterizing not only the data but XML formed metadata describing the system producing that data.-Process:TML captures when and where a sensor measurement or...
  
  
• SensorML
  SensorML
  SensorML is an approved Open Geospatial Consortium standard. SensorML provides standard models and an XML encoding for describing sensors and measurement processes...