Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been changing our lives in many different ways, if you are one of those who are still wondering what AI could possibly do in our daily lives, this read could interest you. An Amazon engineer created an AI-powered cat flap that could stop his cat from bringing home dead animals in the middle of the night shocking him up.
The real problem of owing cats
For some unknown reason, cats love bringing home head animals that they kill. It is a bitter truth, but this is something that most of the cats do and there’s not much we can do about it – Or we can?
Ben Hamm found a solution – AI-powered cat flap
Ben Hamm, an engineer at Amazon was totally exasperated by his cute little murderous cat named ‘Metric’. Like other kitties, this one too brought in the dead, and sometimes half-dead animals into his house.
But what Hamm did next was pretty amazing – he designed an AI-powered cat flap for his home.
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Now, what’s a cat flap? It’s very similar to a doggy dog in which a small flap cut out in your door allows your little pet move in and out of your house. Hamm decided to outfit his cat flap with an AI-enable camera using Amazon’s DeepLens, and also an Arduino-powered locking system.
How Does It Work?
According to Hamm, the camera was loaded with machine vision algorithms which were trained by Hamm himself. These algorithms identified whether Metric was coming in or going out and whether he had prey in his mouth. Whenever the camera would detect prey in the cat’s mouth, it would lock the cat flap, and instantly send a text to Hamm. With this interesting tech in place, Hamm could get up on time and ensure the dead animal didn’t enter his house.
Another interesting thing about this system was that each time the system locked up because the cat had prey in its mouth, the system would send a donation to the National Audobon Society (a society that protects the birds that cats love to kill).
Now, listen to Ben Hamm’s very interesting talk about how his cat ‘Metric’ influenced him to invent this very innovative cat flap.
Even though this system might not go on sale to the public, it does sound like an interesting and fun project. Something that will influence millions of engineers in thinking about how technologies like AI could help us with regular everyday problems.