Not sure what you mean here. If you're talking about artificial ears,
eyes, and so forth, then yes there's a rather large group of researchers
trying to develop sensory neural prosthesis devices. Surely you've heard
of cochlea implants, for example?

Of course I have. The original point made by Trader stands. We don't have
measuring devices that can measure taste and smell (of wine, for example) with
the same accuracy as human taste. Yes, I know we can measure particles in terms
of parts per million or billion. But that still can't describe and explain
human taste.

Trying to mimic perception is a matter of being unable to work out the
neural code for the olfactory system. However, we are better equipped to
distinguish between chemicals with test equipment than we are with our
olfactory system. Bringing it back to the auditory system, we are better
equipped to measure differences in sound with test equipment than our
ears. Our hearing simply isn't precise enough in the transduction
process, nor does it have the information content in the neural code to
account for high precision. In addition, the internal state of the animal
(attention, arousal, etc) adds a highly nonlinear component to the signal,
thereby introducing distortion (this is, as I stated in my other post, an
example of the brain introducing distortion in order to benefit the
animal).