- Tornyol’s drone tracks mosquitoes by flapping their wings and shoots them down in mid-flight
- Can autonomously patrol areas up to 5 acres
- Pre-orders are open with a $100 refundable deposit, ahead of a planned 2027 US launch.
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 toward them. Forget sprays, fly swatters, and stinky citronella candles that blow out halfway through your outdoor dinner—this propelled killer can keep your garden bug-free all by itself.
Or at least that’s what its creators claim. Tornyol’s drones use phased-array ultrasonic sonar (the same basic principle behind a car’s parking sensors) combined with smartphone-friendly microphones and custom signal processing software. The system listens to the specific frequency of a mosquito’s flapping wings, distinguishes it from harmless insects like bees, and then zooms in to kill it in mid-air, using its whirring propellers as a target. In other words, the mosquito is cut into pieces.
Look
The company says its base station carries a 380-microphone array capable of tracking targets in real time at a distance of around 8m, and that planned future drone versions will likely bring that detection capability to 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 hanging around in the air all night. It is considered that a single unit can cover up to five acres (more than 20,000 square meters).
As for safety, Tornyol cites the drone’s small size and covered propellers as proof that it is safe to have around family and pets.
You can reserve one right now for a $100 refundable deposit. Once the drone is ready to ship, you will be given the option between an ongoing subscription of $50 per month or a one-time payment of $1,100 to own the hardware outright. A US launch is planned for 2027, but availability in the rest of the world is TBA, pending local regulatory approval for drones and pest control, which, given what this actually does, may take a while.
It also presents itself as more than just backyard comfort. Tornyol frames its technology as a boon for public health: Mosquitoes are linked to approximately 700,000 deaths a year worldwide due to diseases such as malaria and dengue, and the company claims its approach could eventually reduce the cost of mosquito control.
Right now, however, the achievements 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 curtained-off test area, rather than a mosquito in the wild.
Here is the rumor
So: a small, autonomous, AI-guided 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 are going to have a problem with a device that silently dilutes a blood-sucking insect responsible for ruining many a summer afternoon. If Tornyol’s drones perform as advertised and stay in their lane, this is as acceptable a “killer robot” as killer robots come.
But that’s the thing about 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 are, by design, adjustable. It’s currently tuned to the flapping of a mosquito’s wings, but what’s stopping a future firmware update (or a completely different client) from retuning it to something else?
And once you get comfortable with an autonomous hunter-killer plane policing your backyard, the range writes itself. Mosquitoes today. Fly tomorrow, probably without many complaints either. But mice? Rats? Pigeons? These are bigger, hotter-blooded and considerably more sympathetic targets, and if we’re talking about robots hunting and killing creatures on your property, where is the line drawn and by whom?
Tornyol’s engineers seem to be solving a real problem, and it’s a no-brainer to look for a tool that could make a dent in a global killer like malaria. But there’s also something dystopian about killer home robots, and this is a solid first step toward installing them in our homes.
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