This Robotic Tank Wants To Kill Mosquitoes With A Laser

Flyswatters are a primitive tool from a more primitive age. Anyone wanting to go to war against mosquitoes in the 21st century needs lasers. No, really. Lasers. Even lasers on tiny anti-mosquito tanks.

Spotted by Shephard Media’s Max Rotor, the “the Laser Movable Mosquito Killer Robot” is amazing and ridiculous.

Rotor wrote up the Laser Movable Mosquito Killer Robot for Quill or Capture, a blog covering odds-and-ends that fall on the periphery of Shephard Media’s usual defense coverage.

This bug-killing robot is made by LeiShen, a Chinese company that makes laser navigation tools for home robots. Rotor reports:

They’ve essentially taken their 2D LIDAR technology, commonly seen on home cleaning robots, integrated it on a small UGV and stuck a mosquito killing laser on the top.
A LeiShen Intelligent representative said while they had yet to make a sale, the company was pitching the idea to hospitals, schools or other public buildings in areas blighted by diseases such as malaria or zika.
Through an object recognition and tracking algorithm, the killer robot recognises a mosquito and ‘instantly’ lasers it. The company claims the laser is capable of killing an impressive ’30 to 40 mosquitoes in one second’, a fact I double-checked had not been mistranslated.

That seems an improbably high success rate.

It takes many more seconds for much more powerful military lasers take seconds to burn through trucks and drones.

But mosquitoes are tiny tiny creatures, so here the challenge is less “can the laser kill the mosquito” and more “will three dozen mosquitoes obligingly line up in the laser’s path to get blasted?”

The Laser Movable Mosquito Killer Robot (a name I will never tire of writing) is certainly a novel solution to mosquito-borne illnesses. Defeating the pest is a long-running human ambition. Maybe it is finally lasers that will blast mosquitoes out of existence for good.

Read the full story at Quill and Capture.