- Tornyol’s drone tracks mosquitoes by their wingbeats and takes them down mid-flight
- Can autonomously patrol areas up to 5 acres
- Pre-orders are open with a $100 refundable deposit ahead of a targeted US launch in 2027
Tornyol, a San Francisco-based startup backed by Y Combinator, has built an autonomous microdrone whose sole purpose is to find mosquitoes and fly directly into them. Forget sprays, swatters, and smelly citronella candles that go off halfway through your outdoor dinner—this propeller-powered assassin can keep your yard bug-free all by itself.
Or at least that’s what its creators claim. Tornyol’s drones use ultrasonic phased-array sonar — the same basic principle behind a car’s parking sensors — paired with smartphone microphones and custom signal processing software. The system listens for the specific wingbeat frequency of a mosquito, separates it from harmless insects like bees, and then closes in for a mid-air kill using its spinning propellers as a deal breaker. In other words, the mosquito is chopped to pieces.
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The company says its base station carries a 380-microphone array capable of tracking targets in real-time to a distance of around 8m, with future planned drone versions likely to bring this sensing capability into the aircraft itself.
Each drone flies for about five minutes at a time before returning to its base station to recharge, a process that Tornyol says takes about 30 minutes. The idea is a relay of short, targeted flights rather than a drone loitering in the air all evening. A single unit is pitched as capable of covering up to five acres (over 20,000 square meters).
In terms of safety, Tornyol cites the drone’s small size and shrouded propellers as proof that it’s safe to have buzzing around family and pets.
You can reserve one right now for a $100 refundable deposit. When the drone is ready to ship, you’ll be given the choice of an ongoing $50-a-month subscription or a one-time payment of $1,100 to own the hardware outright. A US launch is pegged for 2027, but availability everywhere else is TBC, pending local drone and pest control approval — which, given what this thing actually does, could take a while.
It’s also believed to be about more than backyard convenience. Tornyol touts its technology as a boon for public health: Mosquitoes are linked to about 700,000 deaths a year worldwide from diseases like malaria and dengue, and the company claims its approach could ultimately reduce the cost of mosquito control.
Right now, though, the results are more modest: on July 14, Tornyol co-founder Alex Toussaint posted a video of the drone’s first confirmed “air-to-air kill”: a moth in a screened-off test area rather than a mosquito in the wild.
Here’s the buzz guy
So: a small, autonomous, AI-controlled drone that identifies live targets and kills them on sight, patrolling your garden 24/7. What could go wrong?
I admit that my sympathy for the mosquito is limited. Few people will take issue with a device that quietly thins out a blood-sucking insect responsible for ruining many summer evenings. If Tornyol’s drones work as advertised and stay in their lane, this is about as tasty a “killer robot” as killer robots get.
But that’s the thing with a system built to autonomously identify a target by sound and eliminate it: the target list is a software decision rather than a hardware one. Tornyol’s own marketing boasts of distinguishing mosquitoes from “beneficial” insects like bees – suggesting that the drone’s kill criteria, by design, can be adjusted. Currently it’s set to a mosquito’s wingspan, but what’s to stop a future firmware update – or a completely different customer – from resetting it to something else?
And once you’re comfortable with an autonomous hunter-killer aircraft guarding the backyard, the scope creep writes itself. Mosquitoes today. Flying tomorrow, probably also without the big complaint. But mice? Rats? Doves? These are bigger, hot-blooded and considerably more likable targets, and if we’re talking about robots hunting and killing critters on your property, where is the line drawn – and by whom?
Tornyol’s engineers seem to be solving a real problem, and it’s easy to find a tool that can put a dent in a global killer like malaria. But there’s also something dystopian about killer domestic robots, and this is a solid first step to placing them in our homes.
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