The firm - Pats

The idea arose when, one morning in 2016, Sjoerd arrived at the MAVlab completely exhausted. He’d had a bag night’s sleep courtesy of mosquitos buzzing around his room. “We thought: ‘we work in a drone lab; can we come up with anything to tackle this?’ After some trial and error we managed to pluck an insect out of the air with a mini-drone. A few more experiments later, we started to think it might be a marketable product.” The system proved to be less suitable for the bedroom, since it requires an expensive computer and a camera. In the greenhouses in Westland, however, there are possibilities aplenty.

“In glasshouse horticulture, they have a lot of problems with insect pests such as moths,” says Bram. “Those critters lay their eggs all over the place. The caterpillars that emerge cause a lot of damage. You can only control them using insecticide and even that is not always effective. We want to use our drones to pluck the moths out of the air before they reproduce.”

The system is currently being tested in three greenhouses. A camera with infrared light detects the moths and a computer calculates the drone’s path. The mini-drone itself is actually very simple: four plastic propellers with a rechargeable battery and a flight controller. “The drone flies towards the moth at lightning speed and sucks it up through a propeller, creating moth confetti,” says Kevin.