In 2024, Tornyol Systems showed how a 1.4-ounce drone could detect and hunt mosquitoes using ultrasonic sensors. Two years later, the Paris startup recorded its first autonomous kill, but the victim was 1 moth, not a mosquito

A mosquito is an awkward target for a machine. It is tiny, fast, difficult to see and constantly changing direction. Now, a Paris startup has shown a 40-gram drone chasing a flying insect through the air and striking it without a human guiding the final move. The catch is important: the insect was a moth, not a mosquito. The demonstration is a real engineering milestone, but it is still far from proving that tiny drones can reliably clear mosquitoes from homes, gardens or cities.

A palm-sized drone has just crossed a strange engineering threshold: it hunted down a flying insect and struck it in mid-air without a pilot guiding the final move.