7
Build anti-mosquito drones
Longer description of your proposed project
I'm currently building a $200 drone that kills mosquitoes like a bat. It locates and identifies them with an ultrasonic sonar, and then kills them with a front propeller.
It turns out, the drone part is quite simple. 20cm-wide agile quadcopters can be found in every toy shop. The control theory needed to intercept a target is the same as on an air-to-air missile, so is well-known and documented.
What's hard is building a 3D sonar able to detect and track a mosquito with a high framerate (mosquitoes are quite agile, and when designing interceptors the main criteria for success is your sensor's refresh speed). This is what I'm working on right now!
My sonar uses mass-produced ultrasonic emitters from car park-assist sensors and mass-produced MEMS microphones as ultrasonic receivers. The operating principle is the same as on military radars. It first emits a microsecond-long 40khz ultrasonic pulse. Then, it listens with a 10x10 microphone matrix for echoes and locates them using frequency-domain beamforming. You can find a good explanation on how the receive-side works here : https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/29/the-daredevil-camera/
I've already built two proof-of-concepts :
The first one I built is able to see the world with a good definition but at a too slow framerate. My writeup made it to the front page of HackerNews and was featured in a hackaday.com article:
The second-one I built uses receive-side beamforming to get a good refresh rate. It is able to scan its environment at 30FPS, which is enough to intercept a mosquito. It can also see sub-centimeter wires. The resolution is not as good as on the first one because I wanted to reduce the design's complexity. Here are two videos of it (color encodes distance to the sensor).
The 3D point cloud might disturb you because ultrasonic waves reflect differently than light, which makes the digital signal processing simpler compared to video at the price of a reduced resolution (which is why bats are more agile than birds that use passive vision)
This sensor will be the basis for the mosquito-hunter drone, but could also be used for robotics in general. It is a a good alternative to lidar with different characteristics (wider field of view, higher framerate and the ability to see very small objects but at a lower resolution).
I'm currently working on a third and final proof-of-concept that combines the resolution of the first sensor with the framerate of the second. Range should be around 40 meters for a 140x140deg field of view.
Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this
I've been building this 3d ultrasonic sonar for a few years (cf the article on my blog) and I have been working on my own drones since I’m 14 (visible in the videos I linked above). I also studied the required control theory at school.
Other ways I can learn about you
https://twitter.com/alextoussss
https://alextoussaint.com/resumev2.pdf
How much money do you need?
20k€ would let me work on this full-time at least until the end of my gap-year and anything above that would help me buy engineering time to make it faster
Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for
I would say a 90% chance of having a viable alternative to LiDAR (really close with my proof-of-concepts, main difficulty is industrialization) and a 50% chance of having a reliable mosquito-hunting machine in the end (still some digital signal processing to figure out, but I'm getting there).
Application status
App status across various funders
Manifund active
EAIF not applying
LTFF not applying
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