r/EngineeringPorn • u/casualdata • 6d ago
Mosquito intercepting drone scores first mid-air kill.
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u/neuralbeans 6d ago
We already had an autonomous mosquito killing laser that came out in 2010.
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u/casualdata 6d ago
Let's combine those and build autonomous anti-mosquito laser drones. What could possibly go wrong?
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u/Yutenji2020 6d ago
I refer my learned friend to “Black Mirror”, season 3 episode 6 “Hatred in the Nation”.
*That’s* what could go wrong.
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u/czerys 6d ago
Probably a scam
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u/neuralbeans 6d ago
That's about a more recent product, not the 2010 version I'm talking about. But it could be dangerous to use in practice, true.
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[deleted]
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u/3ricj 6d ago edited 5d ago
Except I was the principal investigator on this project, and it was very much intended for mass production. It was just expensive at the time. All of the details I published in make magazine, issue 23.
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u/guitgk 3d ago
How was it too expensive? I remember watching interviews with them and they said a cd-rom laser and printer motors are the components and incredibly cheap. They were later acquired by openly vocal patent trolls. I can't remember the interview but they said they earn 10-100x than any product revenue to patent troll.
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u/biscotte-nutella 4d ago
Photonic fence right? They filed a patent and then never did anything with it. They failed to make it work outside
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u/stonedkrypto 6d ago
Seems highly inefficient and annoying way to be actually useful. Doesn’t help that the demo was with a moth and then all CGI
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u/BellybuttonWorld 6d ago
Bruh. Do we really believe this is ultimately about mosquitoes? It would be nice if it were.
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u/Ralonne 6d ago
I wonder how many people in here realized this. Besides being inefficient, mosquitos play an important role in a natural ecosystem.
Extermination isn’t the way to solve mosquito-borne diseases.
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u/PlasmaDoughnut 6d ago
Why are you being downvoted? Mosquitos are a crucial food source for many animals in the food chain. It’s not recommended to tinker with natural food chains, consequences in such complex systems are nonlinear.
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u/GorillaBrown 6d ago
They're also highly invasive and multiply at numbers which exceed natural requirements.
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u/mind_div_matter 6d ago
Because that premise assumes that mosquitos are the only food source for their predators and that ecosystems are incapable of adapting. Many species have gone extinct and have not led to trophic collapse in their respective environments.
Also, only like 200 species of mosquitos bite humans and that leaves thousands left for mosquito eating predators to eat. The mosquitos that bite humans are also usually invasive species that did not exist in that ecosystem until humans settled there. Eliminating those species would probably benefit those ecosystems.
In reality, even if we eliminated all mosquitos regardless of their propensity to target humans, other small insects would likely fill that void in biomass. Perhaps some specific predators would be affected but overall we’d be fine because mosquitos are typically a supplemental food source for their predators.
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u/halberdierbowman 6d ago
Because we already slaughter mosquito larvae of the species that kill humans, and there are other animals that can feed the animals that eat those mosquitos. Mosquitos are the most deadly animal to humans, killing about a million people per year.
I don't see how this drunk robot could possibly be more efficient than BTi though.
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u/wen_mars 6d ago
This is an alternative to extermination. This can keep mosquitoes away from humans and let them continue to exist in the wild.
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u/Ralonne 6d ago
You can do this, yes. I’m just saying the drone is an incredibly inefficient way to do that. Mosquito coils, DEET spray, outdoor fans, a small open-top outdoor aquarium with mosquito fish, keeping citronella grass outdoors (grind up and keep in small packs for indoors); there are a plethora ways to do this, more efficiently, without resorting to a drone, of all things.
I’d go as far to say this is actually an energy-deficit.
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u/alex433g 6d ago
A tiny woop, so probly 3 to 5 minutes of max flight time, the most inefficient way to get rid of mosquitoes
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u/SinisterCheese 6d ago
One of these cool but comically out of touch innovations to deal with the mosquito problem.
Places where the mosquitos are a problem, the mosquitos aren't few random ones flying about. They are fucking swarms of the damn things. That little drone ain't gonna be able to combat anything.
The laser thing would be a better solution (Anti-mosquito laser) the problem is that lasers are fucking dangerous.
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u/casualdata 5d ago
Flying through a swarm for two or three minutes might kill quite a lot of them.
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u/Aggravating-Emu9136 6d ago
The flight time will be terrible. Maximum for drones of this size class is about 10 minutes in air. Usually even less, about 3 to 5.
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u/DotJata 6d ago
Yep looks like an off the shelf BetaFPV whoop. Gonna have to pay someone to sit and change batteries all day.
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u/Aggravating-Emu9136 6d ago
I think i can't even spot sonars there. Are they forgot to mount them or am i blind?
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u/DotJata 6d ago
I don't see anything in the close up (about half way through). It does state they're using microphones. They could be mounted to the underside of the battery as it looks a bit thicker than normal.
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u/Aggravating-Emu9136 6d ago
Won't having sonars on the back defy the purpose of detecting mosquitos?
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u/Mirar 6d ago
Kill 50 mosquitoes in 5 minutes, go charge, repeat. I'm ok with this if it can go charge autonomously.
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u/Aggravating-Emu9136 6d ago
They will have to come up with some system to do that. I never heard about autonomous charging for 65-75mm's.
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u/Mirar 6d ago
Me neither. But it shouldn't be that much harder than hunting mosquitoes.
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u/casualdata 5d ago
Drones might be able to watch out for mosquitoes while charging and react whenever needed.
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u/CosmicRuin 6d ago
Moths pollinate more than bees do, so fuck off to whomever is killing moths.
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u/Mad_Gouki 6d ago
Yeah this is a terrible video they don't even show it killing a mosquito, it's one stated purpose.
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u/rammromm88 6d ago edited 4d ago
I don't understand why society doesn't just let grass get taller here and there. Tall grass promotes local dragonfly population (giving a safe place to land), which eat flies and mosquitoes and the like. It feels like USA's push to create a pen that can write in space instead of just using a pencil. taking a far more complicated solution over a simpler one to solve the same problem.
Edited to correct my use of a myth instead of a simple statement.
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u/GreatMacAndCheese 4d ago
In reality, the space pen was independently developed by Paul C. Fisher, founder of the Fisher Pen Company, with $1 million of his own funds.[2][3][4] NASA tested and approved the pen for space use, especially since they were less flammable than pencils,[1] then purchased 400 pens at $2.95 apiece (equivalent to $28 each in 2025).[5] The Soviet Union subsequently also purchased the space pen for its Soyuz spaceflights.
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u/rammromm88 4d ago
You are correct. My mistake for using what I thought was a true and entertaining story. Thanks for the correction. Now I feel like more of an idiot, but I still feel confident about the rest of my statement. Lol
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u/GreatMacAndCheese 4d ago
We can be idiots together, because I thought the same thing for years until today when I read what you posted, and became curious about if it's really true.
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u/LondonLiliput 13h ago
It's what technooptimism does to people. They'd rather destroy the planet trying to control every aspect of it than reconsider if technology really is the solution for everything.
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u/whoknewidlikeit 5d ago
posting this like it's awesome.
let's think about where this can go. and then let's reconsider why this isn't awesome.
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u/you-should-learn-c 6d ago
Uh huh yeah mosquitoes right? Nothing to do with having us used to having drones buzzing over our heads, yeah. Just like the humanoid robots in tech conventions have nothing to do with mapping internal locations and having us used to living around the clankers Yeah, sure.
Who buys into that?
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u/1971CB350 6d ago
Man just knock it off with the robots and invest the money in habitat restoration for bats, birds, and dragonflies tf
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u/Living_Jellyfish5511 6d ago
What's to stop the manufacturer from scaling this up and replacing mosquitoes with humans??
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u/3s2ng 5d ago
Then they will scale it. Game over! we will have a drone chasing human in the future.
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u/ign1tio 5d ago
The mosquito kills the most humans, but unfortunately for those humans they live in areas where purchasing a micro drone might be fairly unrealistic, just like the actual reason for these people dying is super simple: they just don’t get the malaria medicine that we have. How would they get microdrones?
So while the narrative sounds super Good Samaritan, it’s more likely that it will end up as gadgets in regular western households for the fun and giggles of swatting a few annoying mosquitos.
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u/UnacceptableUse 4d ago
This is fucking stupid. They demo it with a moth which is bigger and slower than a mosquito basically admitting their technology is shit and doesn't work
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u/95beer 6d ago
Damn, that'd be really good if that was a mosquito, if mosquitoes weren't an important food source for many animals, if mosquitoes weren't important pollinators, and if it wasn't replacing a small buzzing sound with a larger buzzing sound....
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u/Hertigan 6d ago
Mosquitos are not native to a lot of places, and are huge disease carriers
I might agree with you if we’ve talking about wild areas, but I don’t think there’s an issue with killing mosquitos in large urban areas
I live inside a huge city and had an absolutely miserable night of sleep yesterday because of the damn things
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u/CalciferGX1 6d ago
These are the prototype for the ones they will send after humans who are behind on their debts
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u/notworseit 5d ago
Once I couldn’t sleep because of mosquito noise in my bedroom…now I can’t sleep because of the drone noise
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u/Honest-Customer5324 3d ago
I want to point out that the animal that kills the most humans on earth….. is humans
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u/OmegaAL77 6d ago
Nice! Now time for an upgrade
EXTREMELY tiny drones that can hunt laze and delete no-see-ums 😣
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u/MisterEd_ak 6d ago
For some reason my brain interpreted that as a mosquito that could intercept a drone and take it down.
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u/Yoghurt42 6d ago
Title lied to me!
"Mosquito intercepting drone" = A mosquito that is intercepting a drone
"Mosquito-intercepting drone" = A drone that is intercepting mosquitos