Extremely excited to announce our first air-to-air kill of a flying moth by an autonomous micro-drone. This is a big step towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.
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All the credits goes to the incredible engineers working with me on this adventure. If you'd like to join us, visit
as with most of our tests, it's first done in HWIL as described here. deployment on embedded hardware should happen in the next few weeks
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Alex Toussaint
@alextoussss
Replying to @alextoussss
This is a hardware-in-the-loop simulation. We have a motion capture system, IR lights on the ping-pong ball and the drones. We simulate sonar rendering, run our DSP and control algorithms on a PC, and just send control commands to the drones. It's a (little) cheating.
some more context on what we're doing here
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Y Combinator
@ycombinator
Tornyol (@tornyolsystems) is building micro-drones that kill mosquitoes.
They use smartphone microphones, car park assist sensors, and some clever DSP and control to transform 40-gram toy drones into mosquito killers.
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It looks like you're already pretty good at killing moths. Moths (and caterpillars) account for billions of $ in crop loss and billions of $ in pesticides to kill them. Can you start killing moths at scale?
Cool, so we're one step away from an autonomous insect genocide that nobody asked for and we don't understand the food chain consequences of. What could go wrong. 
Just build more bat houses.
You’re playing with a global ecosystem, you fools.
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Yeah let’s just eliminate a species that is 100 million years old I’m sure there won’t be any consequences
Great, another product the Military Industrial Complex will have absolutely no interest in. Thank you for your service, nerds! "But I didn´t intend for it..." Oh **** off. We know you know, and you know it.
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Lmao we’re not gonna chase every mosquito down with a drone we’d gene drive them
I don’t think this is a big step towards eradicating mosquitos
When my daughter hears I literally SAVED THE BUTTERFLIES
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Dr. Jon Slotkin
@slotkinjr
Replying to @slotkinjr @chernetsov and 2 others
They might consider moths or another flying insect that is not considered a literal symbol of beauty
A great service to humanity.
Not even our greatest heroes could accomplish such a milestone.
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You know what kills mosquitoes for free? Bats
Don't get me wrong, it's interesting tech but Chiroptera have been doing that job for a million years.
Comms feedback: this demo has doused my existing beliefs about your production readiness.
From prior information (researched at least to the point of hovering over a pre-order page) I was under the impression that you were already hitting mosquitos outdoors.