👁️ A body sensor 🤖 A machine sensor

sense organ

4.8

A sensor on a machine that detects light, sound, distance or temperature

noun
/sɛns ˈɔrɡən/

Specialized

: sensor

The autonomous drone relies on cameras and LiDAR as its sense organ.

Examples

Engineers fitted the inspection robot with a thermal sense organ to find heat loss in pipes.
In the lecture, she compared the rover's radar to a biological sense organ.
The robot's sense organ can detect temperature changes.
Many sense organs are used in modern robotics.
The autonomous drone relies on cameras and LiDAR as its sense organ.
Engineers fitted the inspection robot with a thermal sense organ to find heat loss in pipes.
In the lecture, she compared the rover's radar system to a biological sense organ.

Synonyms

sensory receptor

vssense organ

Specialized

1 5.8

A body part that senses touch, light, or sound and sends signals to the brain

is artificial and built into machines rather than a natural body structure

How Advanced

array

Specialized

152 6.9

sense organ

Specialized

4.8

sensor

898 3.4

detector

Specialized

189 3.5

hygroscope

Specialized

9.9

Surface Forms

sense organ singular

sense organs plural

Morphology

sense + organ

The meaning is directly compositional: combining 'sense' (a faculty for sensing) with 'organ' (a part that performs a function) yields 'an organ for sensing', which a B1 learner who knows both words can readily infer. The technical extension to artificial sensors in robotics is a predictable analogy of biological sense organs and is cross-linguistically common, so the expression is transparent.

Etymology

The term sense organ is also used for machine sensors because people compared a machine part to a body's sense, meaning 'to notice', and organ, meaning a working part. For example, a camera is like an eye, so engineers call cameras and other sensors a machine's sense organs, meaning the parts that let the machine 'notice' its surroundings.