Hey everyone,

I've now been working on this project for 10 months. I have great news to share, and I think now's a good time to share our progress and where we're headed next.

I've started this project based on some very bold assumptions. The great news is that they were mostly on point, and we're now a lot more confident in our original hypothesis : that we can make a cost-effective dent to malaria by building cheap mosquito-hunting drones.

The first insight came from studying mosquito life cycles, and led us to conclude that we wouldn't need nearly as many passes per hour as we initially believed. I initially believed that, to protect a fixed zone from mosquitoes, we'd have to pass at a very high frequency (~1 time a minute) everywhere in the zone, which would be prohibitively expensive at scale. We've now realized that we'd only have to do this on the border of the zone we're defending. To protect a 1km² zone, we can make high-frequency passes on the border of the zone, to avoid mosquitoes coming in and lower-frequency passes inside. Mosquitoes take multiple weeks to reproduce, and females need two long (20min) nectar-seeking or blood-seeking flights to produce and ley eggs. By doing a pass every 20 minutes, we can divide the probability of each successful reproduction by 85%. That would, over the weeks, allow us to eradicate mosquitoes inside the zone.

Our second big success has been on detecting mosquitoes. We've been able to shrink the size and weight of our sonar sensor. Our latest mosquito detector works at three meters, weighs a few dozen grams and should cost $20 at scale. I had initially budgeted for three times more cost, size and weight.

This solves a lot of other issues. One of our concerns was on the noise made by the drone. With a lighter sensor, we can use a lighter drone, which makes a lot less noise and at a higher, more attenuated, pitch. We aim to go as small as a tinywhoop, which would also solve most issues with regulation. They're too light to hurt anything and are extremely quiet. The only issue with them is battery size. We don't expect to have more than 10 minutes of flight time per drone, but they're cheap enough to not be a problem. We'll also investigate doing battery swapping to increase capital efficiency.

Our work on mosquito detection is now complete, and we have a state of the art but obsolete for us ultrasonic phased array sonar. We've decided to open-source it, as it can be used for much more than mosquito detection : air leak detection, people counting, autonomous robots, ... you name it. Anything that needs an accurate 3D map of an environment in all lighting conditions.

We've also done tremendous progress on simulating our system. We now have a complete drone simulation, and are prototyping algorithms for collision avoidance and mosquito hunting. We have great results in simulation so far.

On the hardware side, we have sourced all of the off-the-shelf components we need for our first mosquito killing prototype. We still have to write a lot of embedded code and integrate a few mechanical parts, but it's taking shape. I expect us to have a drone flying in the air by January, and it catching its first mosquitoes in the coming months.

As to the people, I've gone back to school in September for my last year and have recruited Clovis as a co-founder. We're almost working full-time on it, in parallel of our light curriculum. We've done market research and user interviews, and estimate that we could fund our long-term development costs by selling mosquito-hunting drones to individuals throughout the US. I promise that the people cited explicitly or implicitly in my last paragraph will be the first to be delivered!

In terms of funding, we've got great profiles graduating at the same time as us, and we'd like to hire them. Therefore, we're planning to do a fundraising round by April of next year. We have great feedback from angels and VCs, and are working on the pitch for grants from nonprofits. It's mostly a matter of finding the best path for us personally. This post is only a small update, and I plan to write a detailed, budgeted, public white paper on how we could eradicate malaria with mosquito-hunting drones. Our current numbers show that we could eradicate malaria for a very realistic amount, but I won't publish more details before getting our assumptions checked by more people.

As a final note, I'd like to thank the people who have supported us along this journey.

Firstly, Scott Alexander and ACX Grants for giving me the financial support to work on it full-time and for introducing me to the kind community of ACX readers, many of which helped me directly in one way or another. I'd like to mention Austin Chen and Rachel Weinberg, which have helped a lot by handling the technicalities of accepting donations. I'm also deeply thankful of Austin's precious advice. I'd also like to thank Jan Steckel and the Cosys-Lab team in Antwerp for giving us lab space and precious technical advice for six months. Finally, I'd like to thank all of our independent donors. And, a big thank you to the many others who have helped us get this far - you know who you are and your support means a lot!

Useful links

• My twitter for more frequent updates.

• Our website:

• The public page for our latest Sonar sensor, which shows most of its capabilities.

@pmartensen Thank you. Yes, were two and working full-time on it! I post most of the project updates on my twitter : https://x.com/alextoussss

@rwijaya thank you!

@vascoamaralgrilo

Bednets serve as a barrier against mosquitoes during sleep. Our goal is their eradication.

Your extensive arguments reduce analysis to a single metric, cost-effectiveness, to the point of being comical to the average reader. Most would happily pay $5/month to rid their city of mosquitoes instead of relying on nets. I'm not sure why you fail to see that.

@Austin Thank you for perfectly summing the issue up.

@vascoamaralgrilo I'm not sure I get the reason for your hostility. Your donation criteria is yours, and other people have different ones. If you can't see the value of entirely getting rid of mosquitoes in cities for $50/year/person, than I can't do anything for you.

@vascoamaralgrilo Bednets aren’t better, they’re in a different category. While they’re cheap, they don’t cover anything outside of bedtime. Although it’s important everyone in the poorest countries can have one, it won’t be enough to get the last 44% coverage needed, which is what we’re targeting.

About the specific figures, the 2x2m comes from the view distance of the sonar. We’re targeting the sub-250g class of drones, which have very light to no regulation around the world. Your typical football is 320 grams and goes up to 40m/s, so our drones would pack 20x less energy. I’m not concerned about city usage.

@vascoamaralgrilo

We’re not targeting the individual person market. We’re targeting communities that could cover whole cities with a few drones. Drones travel fast, so can clear of mosquitoes impressive volumes of air in a short amount of time. Our plan entire densely-populated cities mosquito-free. To give you a rough sense of the figures, a drone covering a 2x2 meters square traveling at 10m/s covers 40 cubic meters of air per second. Over a conservative 10 meters of height, that’s 4 square meters/second. For 1000 drones ($200k capital, less than the typical drone light show) you clear a square kilometer in 250 seconds. With a conservative availability factor of 1/4, you cover a square kilometer or 20k people at Paris density for a million dollars. Assuming a very conservative yearly replacement rate, that’s $50/year/person.

The figure is already good enough for the developed world, and with some economies of scale and more realistic estimations it will well be worth it for the developing world!

Please don’t hesitate if you have any other questions, I’d be happy to answer!

@Dark-shark-420 Thank you!

@Bernars Directly answering to your email

@Guyrus- Thanks a lot!

@Emile Hahaha, thank you!

@dimitris Thank you !

@Pingu2k Thank you for your help!

@guenael

We've got a 40db SNR from emitter to receiver at 1m with an integration period of 25microseconds.

We have 16 transmitters in a phased array, so with focusing gains we have SNR*16*16.

100 receivers, SNR gains in SNR*100 as noise power adds-up in N and signal power adds-up in N^2

We correlate on a 20 periods-long (17cm) window. Signal adds-up in N^2 and noise in N again.

We're really close to measuring a mosquito's sonar cross section. But, assuming wings 5mm long and 2mm wide, we can estimate it at 10e-6 m^2. A conservative assumption could be around 1e-6 m^2

From the radar range equation : ((10**(40/10))*16*16*100*20*1e-6/((4*3.14)**2))**(1/4) = 2.4 meters.

It turns out, the radar range equation being in R^(1/4) really helps. It stops growing so quickly that even big cross-section differences have a limited effect on the range. Plus, the physics of SNR are really nice with very large transmit and receiver array.

About the drone turbulence I'm not sure it would have a very significant effect in the ultrasonic band we use (40khz). It probably is more of a problem at 20khz than at 40, and there are a lot of ways we could filter it : either electronically, by looking at the spatial and time distribution of the noise, or mechanically by moving it to a region where airflow isn't that disturbed.

The main problem could be the propellers vibrations. But, because we know what the frequencies are (propeller's RPM are controlled by our flight controller) we can dynamically adapt a very narrow cut-band notch filter to ensure it doesn't make its way to our CFAR detection. Flight controllers use the same method to filter propeller noise into gyroscope reading.

Happy to answer any other questions! Invited you on LinkedIn.

@Jonas-Hyllengren Thanks a lot ! Your contribution will definitely help.

@saulmunn thanks a lot for your encouragements :-)

@saulmunn

1. Hard to be sure about it :/

2. That’s already been studied, and the general consensus seems to be that mosquitoes are a small part of the alimentation of their predators, while they cause a disproportionate amount of harm to the human population.

@davekasten We’re mainly targeting the developing world for the moment, but there’s no reason for us to restrict our reach! Thank you for your support.