You wrote: "Why do you assume everyone in the world has native english speakers as friends, willing to do free proofreading?"
So you didn't write that? Ok.
The people who proofread my work aren't in my immediate circle of friends. My point is that you can find people out in the world that aren't in your current bubble.
I have access to people now who speak and read more languages than I ever will. Some of them are in Russia. I think you are inadvertantly placing limits where they may not really be.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
It’s not like 700 kilometers, where you could at least argue this is the case vs the SI unit, but where a kilometer is a useful unit for communication anyway. The natural unit here is a human life, not a thousand human lives.
There are a several other quality issues in the abstract making me wonder if this is a serious effort or a Markov-generated abstract. (“We developed a program for mosquito tracking in real.”)
> I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
In my 50 and nine years on this planet, I have.
> There are a several other quality issues in the abstract ...
It's a pre-print, and the author's first language is not English. Some people struggle with a second language, and I think it's commendable that someone is willing to make their results available.
It has the feel of being machine translated. A short time ago I saw an example of three different verbs in one language being translated into the same verb in English ... I'll see if I can find it. I suspect in the author's first language the first "devices" was something specific that got a generic label in English.
Writing numbers that way is common in various languages. For example, every day on the Polish news the number of newly detected COVID cases is written in the format "13 tys. 574", where "tys." is the abbreviation for “thousand”.
As native-English-speaking academics have become a minority of those publishing in international journals (and fewer journals are doing serious copyediting anyway), there seems to be more and more toleration in science of different ways of writing things based on the author’s own native language.
In a laboratory environment with contrasting background—something they admit isn’t ideal, I assume for real world conditions.
Let’s say the laboratory conditions are real world. To your point, killing ~10% of mosquitos is hardly ideal, but using lasers and computers to do it is cool.
...and shooting sparrows with cannons becomes shooting mosquitoes with lasers since 2021 ;-)
nevertheless, I like the project, much dedication was going into this, lot to learn from...
I personally witnessed a mosquito being made to pop by tensing a muscle. Note that I'm not claiming any specific mechanism of action, or that this is a common human ability, or that more than one species is vulnerable. I've seen it once.
The case I witnessed was 31 to 35 years ago, in camp with a bunch of boys. To help you guess at the species, I can narrow down the location to one of three places. In summer of 1985 or 1986, it could have been in Oklahoma or northern Texas. In summer of 1987 or 1988, it could have been in southern New Hampshire. The boy had very well defined muscles and minimal fat. He got the mosquito to land right in the middle of his biceps. He saved his strength, waiting until the mosquito was almost full before tensing his muscle. The mosquito did not immediately explode; it took a good long time.
Anybody else witnessed it? Anybody able to do it reliably? If so, can you describe the type of mosquito or where it lives or anything else that might identify it?
This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser.
To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people.
The system could be mounted on small drones that would patrol larger areas - but the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
I agree, there needs to be multiple orders of magnitude improvements in HW&SW, as well as domain specific dataset development for this to work at all.
I can imagine using a very accurate image segmentation algo to analyze the background and thereby prevent shooting lasers at vulnerable targets, but it's still hard to see how this is a good idea.
A 1W laser is even more dangerous than you say. It is powerful enough to start wood fires.
1 W laser is in the “a diffuse reflection can do damage” safety class. It’s the kind of laser where you lock doors to the optics lab to prevent people without eye protection accidentally entering when the laser is in operation.
Having a computer point-and-shoot one at random directions in free air is just madness. There is zero discussion of human safety of such a system in the paper.
I can think of an alternative, not sure whether that would be practical, but it's possibly safer than laser: instead of shooting laser, make a turret that shoots (biodegradable, edible) soap water at the mosquitoes, in the smallest dose necessary to make the mosquito's wings stick. It would require some fluid-aerodynamics and projectile motion calculation, however.
On Hacker News? Someone has probably already tried it. Possibly even more than one person — I mean, the linked paper isn’t even the first time I’ve seen research into the idea of anti-mosquito lasers, so anti-mosquito water cannons have probably been tried too.
I didn't think it worthy of a write up. The ML part that made it a bit more interesting was to keep the bees alive but to get the wasps (I'm allergic to wasps), and I couldn't get it to reliably differentiate between the two so it never hit 'production'.
Plain water doesn't work. They just bounce droplets off [0]. My experiments with garden hose and some mosquitoes during watering my garden confirm those findings. Maybe water with soap will work better (due to lower surface tension, droplets will envelop mosquitoes) but I did not try this.
A few grams of sodium chloride is not going to destroy your plumbing or your landscaping. Your plumbing is in daily contact with sodium chloride from the food we eat, the sodium chloride that is in municipal water supplies, and it is a common substance to be found outdoors as well, including soil.
You don’t want to put kilograms of it in your garden, but this device is not consuming anywhere close to that amount of salt. It holds about the quantity of a salt shaker of salt, and can be fired 80 times from that amount.
It would probably be too slow (or you'd need crazy high pressure). The mosquito would have plenty of time tom ove out of the way, especially since it will probably make a sound when shooting the liquid. The advantage of using a laser is that it's basically instant and quiet.
I started thinking about something similar last summer to deal with aggressive flies from a nearby farm.
Perhaps it's possible to make something that's kinda safe for eyesight if you make it track and light up the fly/mosquito for e.g. 50 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds.
You hang it out behind a shed or garage, the lid has a little maze that they crawl into and then they can't find their way out.
My parents always used https://www.bigstinkyflytrap.com/ . It definitely caught a lot of flies, which can be different than catching enough flies of course.
We had a small but persistent issue with flies hanging out by our garbage cans so I purchased one of these fly traps with bait.
It worked far too well.
Within a day it had attracted flies from a large surrounding area. The nearly filled jar of flies had a presence I can only describe as "Stephen King-esque" just buzzing with raw malevolence. If you think one large black fly can make quite the noise I invite you to listen to a 1000+ angry flies in a jar.
And while many were certainly capture - an equally abhorrent number were all over the cans and the side of the house. So a mixed experience.
The method I devised to get rid of these large black flies from indoors:
Open a door and simply herd/walk them out by making yourself big. It's surprisingly easy - so much easier than trying to swat them. They seem to instinctively avoid things moving towards them, and because of that they're pretty easy to herd.
Relatedly - if you need to get a light-seeking insect (such as a moth) out of a room, you can just turn off all the lights and open the window. In general, people look at you like a wizard when you exploit the behavior of a creepy-crawly to get it to do what you want. For example you can catch a spider quite easily by placing a drinking glass in front of it and nudging its behind. It will panic-run forward into the glass.
I had the exact same experience it was absolutely disgusting. I attracted all flies from the neighborhood.
I also tried once with an insecticide which also contained a bait, it came in granules and you had to mix with water and spray all over. The floor of my outdoors where full of dead flies.
Best advice I can give: never use any kind of bait. That’s completely BS, you are never going to kill them all. You want flies to go to another place, keep things clean.
My coworker once had one very annoying fly, he was trying to sleep but that fly constantly was landing on him. He turned fan and directed it on bed, so fly couldn't land on him. Now, that little bugger landed just beside of airflow area and just walked to him.
That's when you go out there with a shopvac with a long extension tube; they're already gathered for you. Maybe finish with a long shot of insecticide, then just plug the intake hose into the exhaust port and let it sit for a few days.
Also, a mason jar with about a half inch of sugar water as bait and a sheet of letter size paper rolled into a cone with the small aperture in the jar works pretty well.
If you are assuming a drone, I feel like it would be more far, far more effective to just fly the drone into the mosquitoes and chop them up, than to have the drones individually pinpoint 1 mosquito at a time with a laser.
Or shoot only horizontally at 1 cm from the ceiling. Sooner or later the mosquito/fly will be there as wellOr shoot only horizontally at 1 cm from the ceiling. Sooner or later the mosquito/fly will be there as well
Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work!
Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room!
This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons).
The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional.
But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right?
BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that some Russian PhD student from a fairly obscure uni either didn't do their research or has reinvented the wheel (or just plain copied the thing without attribution). The list of irrelevant or only very tangentially relevant (it is about mosquitoes, so in scope, right?) references is a dead giveaway there (paper on mosquitoes spreading zika? seriously?).
Oh and that was supposed to be a handheld device to boot. With the same "save the world from malaria" spiel too. I wonder what are the owners of the company that was pushing this concept to investors back then trying to sell today ...
There are actually multiple videos on Youtube showing products from different companies that were attempting to push this as some sort of viable concept.
Shrug, add a nice zoom lens to make it's effective range several meters instead. Of course it would be far sighted but maybe you know most mosquitos will be several meters away anyway. Or have 3 cameras, one for the cm, one for the m and one able to zoom many meters to look at known problem spots like puddles or a bird bath.
Or use a better method than a cheap camera. Like a radar and microphone like the other more famous project does. Because mosquitos have a distinct frequency of flapping their wings. Meaning you can then actually target the biting type. Because .. 95% of the mosquitos around actually do not sting humans(number from the back of my head from a friends paper some years ago). And killing them all has a quite negative impact on biological diversity.
Be sure to include some laser-resistant capabilities in the engineered mosquitoes, so that consumers will be forced to buy upgrades to more powerful lasers.
>> This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons).
That describes about 80% of the field of machine learning today: that's how most new work in machine learning is presented to the community, through preprints on arxiv that never get published, therefore peer-reviewed; and most of it is of the "we did it because we can, not because it makes sense" type. The same goes for much of AI research in the past. Here's John McCarthy:
1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all.
I'm prepared to bet that the exact same work could be published by a respectable research team (you know, with good English) and it would get many adulatory comments in social media (though I hope you would retain your skepticism).
Yes, at 300mm range, it's just a toy, and mounting a 1W laser with a targeting system on a drone is a terrible idea. I can see ways to make this work, though.
You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out.
This is roughly how radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun systems work.
An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.
I saw those videos. The problem is the maintenance, adding yeast and cleaning the trap. Imagine scaling to multiple traps in a house or the garden.
On the other side, burning methane generates CO2: CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O. Methane is distributed nearly everywhere in my country for cooking and heating. That at least solves the problem of refilling.
I guess we should burn a very small amount of methane to lure mosquitoes into those traps. But how about climate change etc.?
> You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out.
Not only more effective, but i imagine it would be easy to misdetect someone's iris as a fly D:
> Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi.
Same thought as well. They must not have done the math on the optics... You'd have a much better chance using an acoustic array (mosquitoes put out a very distinctive sonic frequency), or even better an array of radar modules. There is simply too much noise and data in the visible spectrum to catch something that small without expensive optics and an expensive processor to process all of those pixels.
This. Acoustic array sounds like a great solution for finding that pesky mosquitto that is hiding somewhere in the room. Anyone know how difficult it would be to make this?
Well, you can get a radial acoustic 7 array of MEMS microphones for ~$50, doing stuff with the output is the hard part. That being said, I've used one to localisation the direction that lightning is coming from. Have no idea how good the accuracy would be, but there's likely large room for optimization in that setup; it likely just comes down to the accuracy of the microphones.
I personally would go with the radar route; it's slightly more expensive that the acoustic route, but accuracy would be fantastic, even at a distance.
even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters.
and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime.
possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.
To be fair though, part of that is because they hunt at night.
There are a few places here in Sydney where you see a remarkable cloud of bats feeding in bright light - the lights over the harbour bridge and several of the tax buildings bordering the Botanic Gardens regularly have flocks of bats whirling around presumably attracted to all the insects flying in the bright lights...
Audio would surely be the way to go, IMO, although I would avoid Bluetooth and generally any non essential digital transport both because of latency and possible compression artifacts. One could trick the mosquitoes into flying through a small restricted area in which wires wouldn't pose a problem by making it the only possible way to some bait for example, then setting mikes and traps in there.
Or you could just spray RAID or something similar and kill all the mosquitoes there for pennies. No laser, no bluetooth, no microphones.
And if you want to actually solve the mosquito issue, don't have standing water around. Or make sure fish and frogs can live in it. They love eating mosquito larvae.
Not this boondoggle. Remember, engineering is also about realizing that the fact that you are able to do something doesn't always mean you should.
A LIDAR is not the right solution. A LIDAR misses most of the space a few meters away, and even if by chance the beam passes right over a mosquito, it will be filtered out by the built-in denoising algorithms.
Mosquitos, as we all know, have a highly distinctive auditory signature.
A phased microphone array is the only sensible approach to localized mosquito detection. It would probably work reasonably well.
The problem is that the entire field is patent encumbered, because Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures has done some research on it, and no on in their right mind would go up against those guys.
The paper claims "1 - 5mm" for a mosquito, which seems plausible. Lets pick 5mm out of pure optimism. The new(ism) HQ Raspberry Pi camera modules are 12megapixel ~4000x3000 pixel sensors, if you assume you could recognise a mosquito based on it's flight/movement pattern rather than needing to have an image of the mosquito, maybe having a 2x2 pixel resolution of it might be enough, so you could use an appropriate lens and cover a 5mm x 4000pixel / 2 = 10,000mm or 10m wide by 7.5m tall region. That seems totally do-able. Even up to 4x4 pixel per mosquito at 5m x 3.75m would happily cover the wall of my bedroom with the windows. You _might_ even be able to do that with the cheaper 8 megapixel V2 camera module instead of the HQ one.
The background subtraction is fairly easy to do in OpenCV. Assuming there's not too much moving in the background (I might need to tie back my curtains?) I wonder if the path a mosquito traces out would be distinct enough to detect?
Research (read "the first google hit) suggests mosquitos fly at 1.6-2.4kmh - call it 2 - which is just over half a meter per second, so about 20mm per frame at 25fps, or 8mm per frame at 60fps. If we choose to use the 4px = ~5mm numbers from above, that means if you detect a thing that might be a mosquito, you don't need to search very far around it in the subsequent frame to track it - if it's a mosquito, it's likely to be still there and within 6 or 7 px of where it was in the previous frame. (I've never tried doing this on something so small, but that technique works really well tracking people across multiple frames in a video. See: https://data-flair.training/blogs/python-project-real-time-h... )
I don't think that at least x,y detection of a mosquito in a 12 or 8 megapixel camera is impossible. The 8MP raspi camera has a 63deg horizontal field of view, so that 5m wide assumed view from earlier would be at 5m distance give or take. If you could get your shoot-down laser close enough to your detection camera, you might not need to care about the z axis. The camera module is about 20mm square - at 5m range shooting the laser across the edge of the camera module pcb might be "close enough"? Might not work at short range, though once you're close you could scan the bean around a bit, it'll be super obvious in the camera view when you've got a hit (assuming the background doesn't;t reflect the laser brighter that a lit up mosquito? Great, now I have an excuse to paint my walls with VantaBlack...)
Another idea... Assume a similar setup - a camera aimed at a 5x3.75m cross section of space, with a line laser shining across it (one of those lasers shone through a cylinder that makes a line, like some power tools use to project guidelines). I'd guess it'd be possible (maybe even easy) to distinguish between dust mites and mosquitos lighting up as they cross the line laser? Perhaps have three co-planar line lasers 10mm or 20mm apart to make the timing of aiming your shoot-down laser easier, use the first flash as a detection signal and swivel your galvos to that region, and then use the 2nd/3rd flashes close by to quickly fine tune the aim without needing to swing too far?
(Now I just need to work out which if any of my half finished projects I should stop working on and half finish this one... ;-) )
Great post. I think line laser though is just a point source that spins, creating an illusion of a plane. So it only looks like a line but is actually a moving point. So if the mosquito travels its own length+the line thickness in a time that is less than the time between laser passes, it won't be touched by the laser.
Maybe some line lasers are made like that (now that you mention it I do recall seeing tripod mounted lasers which are probably spinning POV things), but I’ve got a bunch of line and cross laser modules which 100% do not have moving parts. I’m not sure why I think this, but I understand they’re made by just putting a glass cylinder in front of the laser diode module, working as a kind of 2D lens... Pretty sure that’s what you get in jigsaws and circular saws as well?
With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunlight coming from the window.
But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?
> But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?
No a laser is coherent. It has almost the same intensity in it's entire path. If you know the approximate distance you can accurately focus a normal beam of Light into that area. Killing the bug but much safer.
This would protect people standing behind the bug, but if the system mistakenly identified an eye as a bug you would still be delivering a burning quantity of energy focussed on the eye.
I've integrated a few laser engravers and laser-cutting CNCs, so let me clear up a couple misconceptions: Lasers typically have a narrow focal length, just like your LED proposal - otherwise they'd damage the optics/mirrors! They're designed to pass a coherent beam of about 10mm diameter through a series of lenses and mirrors. The beam of an engraver might carry 10W of power in that diameter, which is pretty bright, but decent lenses or mirrors with high transmission and reflection won't be damaged. It's safe for both skin and optics until, say, 100mm after it goes through the primary lens. Hopefully at the surface of the thing you're cutting or engraving, it's a spot size of 0.1mm! With 10W of power in that tiny area, even exotic antireflective glass that can transmit 99% of the light will be atomized.
If the thing you're cutting/engraving isn't present, then 100mm past the focal plane, it's back to 10mm diameter, and 100mm after that, it's 20mm, and just continues dissipating. It's really pretty hard to focus it back into a coherent beam sufficiently narrow to damage eyesight (much less skin).
Yes, the CDRH is really concerned about the possibility of a laser system accidentally lasing a blob of metal into a perfect mirror that will send a coherent beam directly into the eye of an operator standing meters away; I've got laser systems with thousands of hours on them etching reflective foil off of plastic and there's no sign of reflections causing damage to the smoked acrylic that's shrouding the operation.
The typical mechanism used to drive laser engravers is more like a HDD actuator that moves the read/write heads - it's called a galvanometer. Basically a mirror on a stick connected to a magnet. A voice coil pulls the magnet +/- 10 degrees or so; They've got sub-millisecond response times so hitting a moving mosquito would be no problem!
I propose that you suck the mosquitoes through an enclosure with something like a box fan or duct booster. Make sure the entrance and exit has to go through a couple right angles so your laser optics are never visible to someone outside the box. Backlight the inside of the box so that instead of AI to see whether the thing in your camera FOV is a mosquito or a songbird really far away, you just zap any black mosquito-sized blobs that pass through.
I just played a bit with CNC engraving and laser projection, so don't have that extensive knowledge, but AFAIK:
Even with your example of 10W, 10mm beam it has a bit more than 0.12 W/mm^2. Hundred times the power output from the sun. Even if we use a 1W laser, which should be enough for a mosquito, it's still like looking into the sun with a 10x magnifier.
And as you said - you focus the spot in 0.1mm with a small focal length - that's great for cutting or engraving but won't deliver enough energy to a mosquito 5 meters away unless you start with the same beam size, then focus it 5 meters away at the target. Only then it will need another 5 meters for the beam to return to the initial diameter and many more times that to finally be safe.
What I propose is a big reflector and aiming optics directed at it(a bit like a satellite antenna). I didn't do the math, but tens of centimetres or even more than a meter of dimeter. Let's say 50cm==500mm.
Then if you want to focus it to 5mm at 5 meters it will have less than 10mm at +-5cm. You could do the same with a laser but you just don't need to. Instead of 1W laser you can use a 10W powerled, have the same energy at the target but it will be much safer at almost every stage before it.
And what most people think about when they talk about shooting mosquitoes with a laser is, I think, sending a coherent 5mm beam directly - e.g. from a laser pointer. So you don't have to estimate the distance, but it is even more dangerous.
Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something:
> The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern.
tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.
Is there a wavelength that could blind mosquitos and not humans? Mosquitos aren't party to any blinding laser weapons convention, and while it wouldn't kill them they might not survive too long after being blinded.
Ah yeah, they aren't really swayed from finding meals by pitch black dark. It might make them more susceptible to predation but wouldn't be a solution for targeted small areas.
Other than just sensing CO2 and other chemicals they have some kind of way of sensing heat, but maybe that's separate from their eyes. If that is sensed radiatively that might be a good target for some kind of eye safe laser (if it is following thermal gradients in the air near the skin or something, not so much).
> the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
I don't really mind mosquitos outdoors, what I really hate is when I'm trying to sleep and there is a mosquito in the room. This means I have to turn the light bright on and spend time hunting them down or fill the room wit a toxic insecticide gas.
I would rather leave the room (or stay there with my eyes covered - to serve as a bait for the mosquitos), activate the robot and come back when it's done.
When I am in high spirits, I am able to catch them in the dark by their sound. But failing to succed in that for a couple of times, makes my high spirit go away very fast and wanting a auto laser turret, too.
> the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
People like you are killing people! 700k people could be saved with this spinny laser device!
Until the tech is perfected we should lock people in hermetically sealed rooms so as prevent mosquito bites and Malaria spread - one year and the anopheles species will die off !
Let's start a petition with the US dept. and try spreading this policy across to those heathens in Africa and Asia.
For safety, I think using multiple coordinated laser sources would be better (making them all converge at a single point). That, plus obviously a wavelength not dangerous for our eyesight.
Angular precision is an issue, but one could probably go around it by using a closed-loop control system that targets before increasing the power.
Targeting is hard as well, if you want a reliable system, there's probably no alternative to sensor fusion (sound, active infrared range-meter, maybe radar & ultrasound).
In the end, it's probably overkill compared to a trap, but the challenges are interesting.
I'd prefer an indoor 'killer drone'. Something like a little quadcopter, remote controlled in realtime to the target by whichever means, shredding it with one of its rotors.
An interesting future application for computer vision, but until both hardware and software increase in speed and precision by several orders of magnitude, this is not feasible.
Current neural object detection just isn't there yet.
Not to mention the dangers of shooting a powerful 1W laser out in the open...
IIRC Intellectual Ventures was / is also a notorious patent troll. AFAIK this was the main barrier that companies that wanted to head into similar spaces had to face. So I'm glad something open source is being developed.
I would gladly don protective eyewear before going to bed if it meant having a mosquito free night. I absolutely hate the little fuckers with a passion.
I find that the slight breeze created by a house fan is enough to throw the mosquitos in my room off. They find it extremely hard to fly in “turbulence.”
Haha, I've had this idea rattling about my brain for some time too (though mine went a bit further in scope instead - all sorts of crop pest control for small-scale farming situations, such as greenfly, caterpillars, etc, with training to avoid positive visitors such a bees)
Early on, I dismissed ultrasound - unless some kind of funky triangulation went on, I think the resolution would be far too low and risk of false positives too high - but I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you had on how that might work. That said, recognising the flight noises of certain bugs would make sense to me - only as a way to trigger a stop-and-sweep cycle though.
But as much as the idea excites me, "real" exploration of the space will only happen when I get lots of time and a fair bit of money - and maybe some land! Alas, I'm nowhere near that point yet.
What about a triple beam setup? The individual beams would be only half or a third as powerful, making them safer to human eyes. Only where they cross they would carry enough power to zap the mosquito...
This laser is 200 times too powerful to be considered "mostly safe" for human ayes (cat 3R) and 1000 times too powerful to be considered safe (cat 2).
I toyed with the idea but it's hazardous in any usable setup.
If you'd like to do it moderately safe I'd stay away from lasers. Use a power LED and parabolic reflector to make the beam as incoherent as possible and then focus it with optics to create very narrow focal depth. Then it will still be able to burn the mosquito but won't be a blinding hazard as little as 20 centimetres from the focal point.
Not all species of mosquitos are bad, e.g. there is only one out of 3500 that spreads malaria, some feed on nectars and are very important pollinators. Can this tell the difference between the different kinds? Or will the drones buzz around the garden lasering anything vaguely mosquito shaped?
A previous "mosquito fence" claimed to be able to recognize not only species, but also specifically female mosquitos, by wing beat characteristics. So it should be possible.
I just moved to a property near a pond that is severely infested with midge flies and mosquitos. The water is supposed to be treated by the HOA but they've neglected it for a while I guess. A solution like this wouldn't work due to the sheer volume of insects in the air at any given time (millions gathering around my block). I rigged up a door reed switch that turns on high power fans for 30 seconds when opened that helps keep them out of my house, but I'm trying to figure out a better solution to actually kill them around the clock. Thinking of controlling an electric pressurized washer with a pi and spraying swarms with a solution of water, soap and neem oil.
A fan that blows them into a metal mesh filter is sufficient. The fan keeps them stuck against the filter until they dehydrate and die. Propane is often used to attract them to the fan but that may not be necessary in your case.
Wow I didn’t know about this, but it looks like more than just an old wives tale. Is there a connection between killing mosquito larva and why we like to throw coins in a fountain for ‘good luck’?
There is a pond in my neighborhood that's not treated. The years I've used Mosquito Bits and Dunks, the mosquito population has crashed to tolerable levels. Bti is proven to work and totally safe for then environment. It's a small price to pay to be able to enjoy my backyard. If I ever move, my neighbors are going to miss my contribution.
I have many bats under roof, often see them flying at night, but there are still many mosquitoes nearby (very slow water river about 1km from me). Bats help but will not remove problem entirely.
Have you considered contacting your local vector control office? If it's just an ornamental pond rather than a natural waterway, mosquito fish are an option.
The other day I decided to make use of our garden and work outside. Within 20 seconds I was being swarmed by the buggers. I thought of using some sort of anti mosquito white noise to repel them but no luck (although it did seem to work for some commenters).
I've had this idea many years ago and my solution to that problem was to use two or more lasers of lower power that all shoot at the same point in 3 dimensional space. If you guess wrong then at least you won't set your house on fire (or blind someone).
The FAA might take objection too. Some places won't let you have lasers within a certain range of an airport. Also, what happens if the mosquito turret mistakes a 747 for a mosquito? Sounds like an effective way to blind pilots. Cool idea though, might be fun indoors if your house is fireproofed.
What they don't seem to work out is that they're drawing a super clear line in the sky directly back to themselves, and police in choppers have colleagues on the ground who are very happy to show up and arrest the guy with the laser...
I have a 1W laser. Aiming it at your hand and turning it on will immediately cause a painful burning sensation. I've never used it without goggles, but it will burn dang near anything you point it at.
The average laser pointer for a presentation, for reference, is less than .005 Watts (<5mW)
A laser used for CDR writing is already powerful enough. The big trick for mosquito hunting is to pulse a number of smaller lasers, briefly, synchronized and aiming for the same spot from different angles. That takes care of the fire and blinding damage but will still harm the much less solid mosquito.
Not automated but one of my all time favorite methods of taking out flies and wasps was the Bug-a-Salt. Guy had a fun idea, spent a ton to make it a reality and appears to still be making it many years on. Kudos to him.
I have one of these for killing black flies that wander into my house. It's not the most efficient way to kill flies I've found, but it's definitely the most satisfying.
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[ 18.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadI think you're being a bit harsh.
Unfortunately it is true with at least academic articles typos and grammatical errors are it will be perceived as low quality article.
“Mr. Ildar Rakhmatulin South Ural State University“
Perhaps you should just go with your original thought and not read anything if you find any kind of grammatical error.
Why do you assume everyone in the world has native english speakers as friends, willing to do free proofreading?
Where did I do this?!?
I know people who do this, but I know many native english speakers. People in russia for example might not have that opportunity.
So you didn't write that? Ok.
The people who proofread my work aren't in my immediate circle of friends. My point is that you can find people out in the world that aren't in your current bubble.
I have access to people now who speak and read more languages than I ever will. Some of them are in Russia. I think you are inadvertantly placing limits where they may not really be.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
It’s not like 700 kilometers, where you could at least argue this is the case vs the SI unit, but where a kilometer is a useful unit for communication anyway. The natural unit here is a human life, not a thousand human lives.
There are a several other quality issues in the abstract making me wonder if this is a serious effort or a Markov-generated abstract. (“We developed a program for mosquito tracking in real.”)
> I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
In my 50 and nine years on this planet, I have.
> There are a several other quality issues in the abstract ...
It's a pre-print, and the author's first language is not English. Some people struggle with a second language, and I think it's commendable that someone is willing to make their results available.
"there are hundreds of different creams, devices, and other devices. "
As native-English-speaking academics have become a minority of those publishing in international journals (and fewer journals are doing serious copyediting anyway), there seems to be more and more toleration in science of different ways of writing things based on the author’s own native language.
And then I see comments that basically amount to: "haha, dumb foreigners can't speak english LOL"
Let’s say the laboratory conditions are real world. To your point, killing ~10% of mosquitos is hardly ideal, but using lasers and computers to do it is cool.
6/10. Want to try.
https://entomologytoday.org/2020/03/19/when-a-mosquito-cant-...
I personally witnessed a mosquito being made to pop by tensing a muscle. Note that I'm not claiming any specific mechanism of action, or that this is a common human ability, or that more than one species is vulnerable. I've seen it once.
The case I witnessed was 31 to 35 years ago, in camp with a bunch of boys. To help you guess at the species, I can narrow down the location to one of three places. In summer of 1985 or 1986, it could have been in Oklahoma or northern Texas. In summer of 1987 or 1988, it could have been in southern New Hampshire. The boy had very well defined muscles and minimal fat. He got the mosquito to land right in the middle of his biceps. He saved his strength, waiting until the mosquito was almost full before tensing his muscle. The mosquito did not immediately explode; it took a good long time.
Anybody else witnessed it? Anybody able to do it reliably? If so, can you describe the type of mosquito or where it lives or anything else that might identify it?
To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people.
The system could be mounted on small drones that would patrol larger areas - but the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
A 1W laser is even more dangerous than you say. It is powerful enough to start wood fires.
Having a computer point-and-shoot one at random directions in free air is just madness. There is zero discussion of human safety of such a system in the paper.
How well/badly dd it work?
Where's the blog post?
:-)
[0] https://www.livescience.com/20733-mosquitoes-survive-raindro...
https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower
You don’t want to put kilograms of it in your garden, but this device is not consuming anywhere close to that amount of salt. It holds about the quantity of a salt shaker of salt, and can be fired 80 times from that amount.
Most are indeed very lethargic, but there are some much more agile variants out there.
Perhaps it's possible to make something that's kinda safe for eyesight if you make it track and light up the fly/mosquito for e.g. 50 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds.
You hang it out behind a shed or garage, the lid has a little maze that they crawl into and then they can't find their way out.
My parents always used https://www.bigstinkyflytrap.com/ . It definitely caught a lot of flies, which can be different than catching enough flies of course.
It worked far too well.
Within a day it had attracted flies from a large surrounding area. The nearly filled jar of flies had a presence I can only describe as "Stephen King-esque" just buzzing with raw malevolence. If you think one large black fly can make quite the noise I invite you to listen to a 1000+ angry flies in a jar.
And while many were certainly capture - an equally abhorrent number were all over the cans and the side of the house. So a mixed experience.
The method I devised to get rid of these large black flies from indoors:
Open a door and simply herd/walk them out by making yourself big. It's surprisingly easy - so much easier than trying to swat them. They seem to instinctively avoid things moving towards them, and because of that they're pretty easy to herd.
I also tried once with an insecticide which also contained a bait, it came in granules and you had to mix with water and spray all over. The floor of my outdoors where full of dead flies.
Best advice I can give: never use any kind of bait. That’s completely BS, you are never going to kill them all. You want flies to go to another place, keep things clean.
Flies hate wind, use fans.
Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room!
This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons).
The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional.
But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right?
BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that some Russian PhD student from a fairly obscure uni either didn't do their research or has reinvented the wheel (or just plain copied the thing without attribution). The list of irrelevant or only very tangentially relevant (it is about mosquitoes, so in scope, right?) references is a dead giveaway there (paper on mosquitoes spreading zika? seriously?).
Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw
Oh and that was supposed to be a handheld device to boot. With the same "save the world from malaria" spiel too. I wonder what are the owners of the company that was pushing this concept to investors back then trying to sell today ...
There are actually multiple videos on Youtube showing products from different companies that were attempting to push this as some sort of viable concept.
The paper cites even earlier stuff:
> For the first time, the idea of using a laser to protect against insects was expressed in the early 1980s by American astrophysicist Lowell Wood.
That would make you a spoil sport, burst my bubble... I am going to have a little cry in the corner now.
I really wanted a AI powered, laser equipped, mosquito hunting drone for my house. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
This is why I should not be in charge of anything.
That describes about 80% of the field of machine learning today: that's how most new work in machine learning is presented to the community, through preprints on arxiv that never get published, therefore peer-reviewed; and most of it is of the "we did it because we can, not because it makes sense" type. The same goes for much of AI research in the past. Here's John McCarthy:
1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi...
(Take note that the above was written in 1973)
I'm prepared to bet that the exact same work could be published by a respectable research team (you know, with good English) and it would get many adulatory comments in social media (though I hope you would retain your skepticism).
You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out.
This is roughly how radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun systems work.
An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.
Alas, as I discovered recently when looking at those nifty, cheap, USB-powered UV + fan mosquito killers -- mosquitoes aren't attracted to UV.
Evidently they are attracted to CO2 and warmth, which are a bit harder to generate at 5V, sadly.
On the other side, burning methane generates CO2: CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O. Methane is distributed nearly everywhere in my country for cooking and heating. That at least solves the problem of refilling.
I guess we should burn a very small amount of methane to lure mosquitoes into those traps. But how about climate change etc.?
If you have a mosquito problem, refilling your traps is the least of your worries.
(These types of traps are commercially available and quite effective.)
Not only more effective, but i imagine it would be easy to misdetect someone's iris as a fly D:
Same thought as well. They must not have done the math on the optics... You'd have a much better chance using an acoustic array (mosquitoes put out a very distinctive sonic frequency), or even better an array of radar modules. There is simply too much noise and data in the visible spectrum to catch something that small without expensive optics and an expensive processor to process all of those pixels.
I personally would go with the radar route; it's slightly more expensive that the acoustic route, but accuracy would be fantastic, even at a distance.
even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters.
and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime.
possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.
You could have several bluetooth mikes scattered around the room for good triangulation
There are a few places here in Sydney where you see a remarkable cloud of bats feeding in bright light - the lights over the harbour bridge and several of the tax buildings bordering the Botanic Gardens regularly have flocks of bats whirling around presumably attracted to all the insects flying in the bright lights...
And if you want to actually solve the mosquito issue, don't have standing water around. Or make sure fish and frogs can live in it. They love eating mosquito larvae.
Not this boondoggle. Remember, engineering is also about realizing that the fact that you are able to do something doesn't always mean you should.
A phased microphone array is the only sensible approach to localized mosquito detection. It would probably work reasonably well.
The problem is that the entire field is patent encumbered, because Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures has done some research on it, and no on in their right mind would go up against those guys.
It would probably be louder than desired, though, unless ultrasonic.
The paper claims "1 - 5mm" for a mosquito, which seems plausible. Lets pick 5mm out of pure optimism. The new(ism) HQ Raspberry Pi camera modules are 12megapixel ~4000x3000 pixel sensors, if you assume you could recognise a mosquito based on it's flight/movement pattern rather than needing to have an image of the mosquito, maybe having a 2x2 pixel resolution of it might be enough, so you could use an appropriate lens and cover a 5mm x 4000pixel / 2 = 10,000mm or 10m wide by 7.5m tall region. That seems totally do-able. Even up to 4x4 pixel per mosquito at 5m x 3.75m would happily cover the wall of my bedroom with the windows. You _might_ even be able to do that with the cheaper 8 megapixel V2 camera module instead of the HQ one.
The background subtraction is fairly easy to do in OpenCV. Assuming there's not too much moving in the background (I might need to tie back my curtains?) I wonder if the path a mosquito traces out would be distinct enough to detect?
Research (read "the first google hit) suggests mosquitos fly at 1.6-2.4kmh - call it 2 - which is just over half a meter per second, so about 20mm per frame at 25fps, or 8mm per frame at 60fps. If we choose to use the 4px = ~5mm numbers from above, that means if you detect a thing that might be a mosquito, you don't need to search very far around it in the subsequent frame to track it - if it's a mosquito, it's likely to be still there and within 6 or 7 px of where it was in the previous frame. (I've never tried doing this on something so small, but that technique works really well tracking people across multiple frames in a video. See: https://data-flair.training/blogs/python-project-real-time-h... )
I don't think that at least x,y detection of a mosquito in a 12 or 8 megapixel camera is impossible. The 8MP raspi camera has a 63deg horizontal field of view, so that 5m wide assumed view from earlier would be at 5m distance give or take. If you could get your shoot-down laser close enough to your detection camera, you might not need to care about the z axis. The camera module is about 20mm square - at 5m range shooting the laser across the edge of the camera module pcb might be "close enough"? Might not work at short range, though once you're close you could scan the bean around a bit, it'll be super obvious in the camera view when you've got a hit (assuming the background doesn't;t reflect the laser brighter that a lit up mosquito? Great, now I have an excuse to paint my walls with VantaBlack...)
Another idea... Assume a similar setup - a camera aimed at a 5x3.75m cross section of space, with a line laser shining across it (one of those lasers shone through a cylinder that makes a line, like some power tools use to project guidelines). I'd guess it'd be possible (maybe even easy) to distinguish between dust mites and mosquitos lighting up as they cross the line laser? Perhaps have three co-planar line lasers 10mm or 20mm apart to make the timing of aiming your shoot-down laser easier, use the first flash as a detection signal and swivel your galvos to that region, and then use the 2nd/3rd flashes close by to quickly fine tune the aim without needing to swing too far?
(Now I just need to work out which if any of my half finished projects I should stop working on and half finish this one... ;-) )
But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?
haven't you just described how to make a laser?
If the thing you're cutting/engraving isn't present, then 100mm past the focal plane, it's back to 10mm diameter, and 100mm after that, it's 20mm, and just continues dissipating. It's really pretty hard to focus it back into a coherent beam sufficiently narrow to damage eyesight (much less skin).
Yes, the CDRH is really concerned about the possibility of a laser system accidentally lasing a blob of metal into a perfect mirror that will send a coherent beam directly into the eye of an operator standing meters away; I've got laser systems with thousands of hours on them etching reflective foil off of plastic and there's no sign of reflections causing damage to the smoked acrylic that's shrouding the operation.
The typical mechanism used to drive laser engravers is more like a HDD actuator that moves the read/write heads - it's called a galvanometer. Basically a mirror on a stick connected to a magnet. A voice coil pulls the magnet +/- 10 degrees or so; They've got sub-millisecond response times so hitting a moving mosquito would be no problem!
I propose that you suck the mosquitoes through an enclosure with something like a box fan or duct booster. Make sure the entrance and exit has to go through a couple right angles so your laser optics are never visible to someone outside the box. Backlight the inside of the box so that instead of AI to see whether the thing in your camera FOV is a mosquito or a songbird really far away, you just zap any black mosquito-sized blobs that pass through.
Even with your example of 10W, 10mm beam it has a bit more than 0.12 W/mm^2. Hundred times the power output from the sun. Even if we use a 1W laser, which should be enough for a mosquito, it's still like looking into the sun with a 10x magnifier.
And as you said - you focus the spot in 0.1mm with a small focal length - that's great for cutting or engraving but won't deliver enough energy to a mosquito 5 meters away unless you start with the same beam size, then focus it 5 meters away at the target. Only then it will need another 5 meters for the beam to return to the initial diameter and many more times that to finally be safe.
What I propose is a big reflector and aiming optics directed at it(a bit like a satellite antenna). I didn't do the math, but tens of centimetres or even more than a meter of dimeter. Let's say 50cm==500mm.
Then if you want to focus it to 5mm at 5 meters it will have less than 10mm at +-5cm. You could do the same with a laser but you just don't need to. Instead of 1W laser you can use a 10W powerled, have the same energy at the target but it will be much safer at almost every stage before it.
And what most people think about when they talk about shooting mosquitoes with a laser is, I think, sending a coherent 5mm beam directly - e.g. from a laser pointer. So you don't have to estimate the distance, but it is even more dangerous.
it's literally called ``Raspberry PI for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser'' not quite sure what you were expecting
Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something:
> The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern.
tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.
Other than just sensing CO2 and other chemicals they have some kind of way of sensing heat, but maybe that's separate from their eyes. If that is sensed radiatively that might be a good target for some kind of eye safe laser (if it is following thermal gradients in the air near the skin or something, not so much).
I don't really mind mosquitos outdoors, what I really hate is when I'm trying to sleep and there is a mosquito in the room. This means I have to turn the light bright on and spend time hunting them down or fill the room wit a toxic insecticide gas.
I would rather leave the room (or stay there with my eyes covered - to serve as a bait for the mosquitos), activate the robot and come back when it's done.
Or at least that could tell a camera where to look.
People like you are killing people! 700k people could be saved with this spinny laser device!
Until the tech is perfected we should lock people in hermetically sealed rooms so as prevent mosquito bites and Malaria spread - one year and the anopheles species will die off !
Let's start a petition with the US dept. and try spreading this policy across to those heathens in Africa and Asia.
For safety, I think using multiple coordinated laser sources would be better (making them all converge at a single point). That, plus obviously a wavelength not dangerous for our eyesight.
Angular precision is an issue, but one could probably go around it by using a closed-loop control system that targets before increasing the power.
Targeting is hard as well, if you want a reliable system, there's probably no alternative to sensor fusion (sound, active infrared range-meter, maybe radar & ultrasound).
In the end, it's probably overkill compared to a trap, but the challenges are interesting.
Bzzzt.
https://photonicsentry.com/
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/death-star-laser-zaps-mosqitoe...
Just a general question, what are the criteria for living organisms that do requires ethical approval? Is the threshold by organism size?
Early on, I dismissed ultrasound - unless some kind of funky triangulation went on, I think the resolution would be far too low and risk of false positives too high - but I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you had on how that might work. That said, recognising the flight noises of certain bugs would make sense to me - only as a way to trigger a stop-and-sweep cycle though.
But as much as the idea excites me, "real" exploration of the space will only happen when I get lots of time and a fair bit of money - and maybe some land! Alas, I'm nowhere near that point yet.
I toyed with the idea but it's hazardous in any usable setup.
If you'd like to do it moderately safe I'd stay away from lasers. Use a power LED and parabolic reflector to make the beam as incoherent as possible and then focus it with optics to create very narrow focal depth. Then it will still be able to burn the mosquito but won't be a blinding hazard as little as 20 centimetres from the focal point.
Thank you for your thoughtful explanation.
(And Australia’s laws here were decided based on safety standards, the figures of which uuidgen points out.)
The war against the mosquito goes on.
I've had this idea many years ago and my solution to that problem was to use two or more lasers of lower power that all shoot at the same point in 3 dimensional space. If you guess wrong then at least you won't set your house on fire (or blind someone).
Don't pilots have protective windows?
What they don't seem to work out is that they're drawing a super clear line in the sky directly back to themselves, and police in choppers have colleagues on the ground who are very happy to show up and arrest the guy with the laser...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCCLbcC25Rs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaOhD2r-Y8c
The average laser pointer for a presentation, for reference, is less than .005 Watts (<5mW)
https://www.bugasalt.com/
https://country-blocker.zend-apps.com/scripts/4982/205c3608e...