Humans do everything they can to kill cockroaches. According to foreign media reports, Scottish scientists built an “AI laser turret” that accurately identified cockroaches with powerful computer computing power and automatically fired laser light to kill them; the results were published in the journal Oriental Insects.
Technology media ExtremeTech reported that Ildar Rakhmatulin, a researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, tried to use AI-powered machine vision systems for home pest control.
At first, he focused on mosquitoes, and he also successfully made a laser device to kill mosquitoes; his next target was cockroaches, after all, as we all know, cockroaches have a greater impact on public health.
This AI laser turret is based on NVIDIA’s “Jetson Nano”. Rakhmatulin and his team used 1,000 cockroach images under different lighting to train Nano to identify targets and track cockroach movements.
Nano connects two camera lenses and is responsible for finding cockroaches. Once found, Nano will immediately calculate the distance of the cockroaches and transmit the information to the galvanometer.
The galvanometer then adjusts the direction of the mirror to lock the cockroach, and then sends out laser light to annihilate the target.
The researchers pointed out that the machine can not only identify cockroaches with high accuracy, but also can reach a distance of 1.2 meters.
The research team also tested different laser powers and found that lower power lasers can trigger the flight response of cockroaches, which can be used to keep cockroaches from hiding in certain dark areas. As for higher power lasers, it can effectively kill cockroaches.
This technology is expected to become an alternative to traditional cockroach methods and is not too expensive.
However, it will take some time for Rakhmatulin’s research results to be used in restaurants, public health institutions and other places, because the laser can still harm the human eye without proper protection measures.
Image: AI generated by Teknonel
