Igeekphone 7/17: Tech media Gizmodo published a blog post yesterday (July 16), reporting that French startup Tornyol has made significant progress in the drone mosquito control project. A drone weighing approximately 40 grams successfully killed a moth.
According to data released by the World Health Organization, malaria claims the lives of over 600,000 people each year, with the majority being young children. Tornyol was established in 2025 and has received support from the Y Combinator startup accelerator. It aims to achieve the goal of automatically killing mosquitoes using drones.
On July 15th, the company’s engineer Alex Toussaint posted a tweet on the X platform, sharing a video that demonstrated the autonomous micro drone’s first successful capture of a flying moth, marking an important step towards the goal of mosquito eradication.
During the demonstration, without any manual control throughout the process, approximately 40 grams of miniature quadcopter drones successfully conducted autonomous aerial interception of flying insects.
This demonstration is conducted using the hardware-in-the-loop method. The external motion capture camera is responsible for tracking the drone. The computer outside the aircraft processes most of the flight data and then transmits the instructions back to the aircraft. The company stated that in the subsequent version, all perception and computing functions will be transferred to the onboard system.
Igeekphone has attached the relevant screenshots below:
In terms of technical implementation, the unmanned aircraft is equipped with ultrasonic sonar. Its working mode is similar to that of vehicle parking sensors. It detects by emitting ultrasonic waves and receiving the echoes reflected by the insects. The system also combines a miniature microphone with custom software to analyze the subtle Doppler shift generated by the insects’ wing flapping, in order to identify small insects that are difficult to be captured by traditional visual systems.
According to the description of the vision on the official website, this miniature drone can fly for a maximum of 3 minutes at a time, patrol an area of up to 5 acres, and then automatically return to the charging station. After locking onto the target, it uses any one of the 4 miniature propellers to directly kill mosquitoes.