Mosquito-killing drone blasts bloodsuckers to bits
Popular Science...
The buzzing sound outside isn’t a blood-sucking mosquito. It’s a mosquito’s worst nightmare.
That’s the goal, at least, for French startup Tornyol. The company is building a tiny, autonomous quadcopter drone designed to detect and eliminate the insects from a digitally mapped-out area. Mimicking a bat, the drone uses ultrasonic sonar to identify mosquitoes based on their unique wingbeat frequency. It then locks on the target and barrels toward them at high speed to deal a killing blow. Though the drone relies on modern smartphone tech and software to “see” the world around it, its execution method is decidedly old-fashioned: it simply shreds the mosquitoes into bug bits using its propellers.
The 40-gram quadcopter weighs roughly the same as a golf ball. While it is still in development, Tornyol is making progress. This week, company founder Alex Toussaint posted a clip on X demonstrating what he describes as the drone’s first successful “air-to-air kill.” But the insect killer’s first mangled victim wasn’t a mosquito at all. It was an unlucky moth. In the clip, Toussaint can be seen releasing the moth into a small white room before scurrying out of frame. The Tornyol drone then comes buzzing in and locks onto the fluttering insect. A chase ensues for several seconds and concludes with the drone ramming the moth, instantly grinding it into gory bits.
Hopefully, the moth’s sacrifice won’t be in vain. Moving forward, Tornyol wants to focus its drone strictly on mosquito populations. When fully operational, the company says its aerial sentry will be able to autonomously patrol an area of up to five acres. The drone will buzz around constantly scanning for targets for three minutes at a time, before directing itself back to a base station to recharge its battery. Currently, potential customers can either buy the drone outright for $1,100 or opt for a $50-per-month subscription plan. The ultimate goal here, the company states in bold capital letters on its website, is simply: “NO MORE MOSQUITOES.”
“Because these drones are so small, inexpensive and yet very fast, we’ll be capable of killing mosquitoes at an unprecedented scale and cost,” the company writes on its online manifesto.
Taking on ‘humanity’s oldest and worst enemies’
Mosquitoes aren’t just annoying pests. After centuries of efforts to drive down their numbers with nets and insecticides, they are still responsible for hundreds of thousands of human deaths annually. In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that malaria spread by mosquitoes accounted for 597,000 deaths across 83 countries. Warming temperatures and longer summers in much of the world may make the situation even worse. Citing those figures, Tornyol characterizes the flying disease vectors as “one of humanity’s oldest and worst enemies.”
Toussaint says the technology powering his mosquito hunter actually began years ago with a dream of delivering a can of soda from his fridge to his couch without getting up. He initially wanted to equip a small drone with cameras for vision, but quickly realized that they were too heavy and required too much computing power. That setback eventually led to LeSonar2, a phased array that uses 380 smartphone microphones and parking assist sensors to listen to echoes.
In practice, the drone emits an ultrasonic pulse and then uses the microphones to listen for insect wingbeat signals. Toussaint trained the system to tell the difference between various insects by their subtly unique wingbeats. For example, wasps have long, thin wings and a slower wingbeat than fruit flies, with their shorter, stubbier wings. Mosquitoes’ wingbeats are even faster still. This insect-detection capability is essential to ensure that when the drone is eventually released into the wild, it doesn’t wind up laying waste to innocent bees and butterflies that might get caught in its path.
Though the drone’s tiny, lightweight form factor makes it an attractive sentry, its build also gives it some limitations. Currently, the drone can only fly for three minutes before it runs out of battery. Once that happens, it needs to return to its pod to recharge, which can take up to 30 minutes. While the company notes it’s looking into ways to swap out batteries for longer runtime, a cycle of three minutes on and a 30-minute rest likely gives mosquitoes plenty of time to regroup or flee. It’s also unclear how many bugs the drone can take out before it needs maintenance. After all, it deals the final blow by ripping the insects apart with its propellers—a process that presumably causes some wear and tear on the hardware itself.
Still, Tornyol says it isn’t content with killing just the lone mosquito buzzing around the front porch. The company wants to eliminate its entire bloodline. Eventually, they say all the data collected by their drones will help them create a high-definition map of mosquito breeding grounds. Analyzing that data should help shed light on where mosquitoes are seeking out blood, where they lay their eggs, and where they feed on nectar.
“Factoring that in, we believe we’ll be able to completely eradicate mosquitoes from areas where humans live,” Tornyol says on its site.
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