Amazon engineer created an interlocking device with AI, which does not allow a cat with street loot into the house

Amazon engineer Ben Hamm has developed a clever blocker that prevents his cat, Metric, from bringing home caught by hunting paws and teeth and in fact already dead birds and rats.

In his speech at the Ignite Seattle event, Ben told an interesting story that his cat often brought dead animals and birds to the house.




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It got to the point that Metrik once brought his prey home at the moment when Hamm was doing something interesting with his girlfriend.

In general, the inquisitive mind of the engineer demanded to come up with a solution to this problem!

The owner of the cat-predator stressed that he did not want to leave his pet on the street all night.

Lock the house Metric is also not an option, as the cat needs to go to the toilet.



To get rid of dead small animals at home, the engineer decided to create a smart blocker that locks the cat door if the pet goes home with the prey.





By the way, it turned out that this is not only his problem, but also another 4 million cat owners in the United States.



He did not want to mock his beloved cat - he didn’t want to hang a bell and colorful illumination on him.



So in the course went engineering savvy and machine learning.

A blocking device was created, which still needed to be taught to understand that the entrance of a cat was prohibited.



Since Metrik climbs quite briskly along his path to the entrance to the house, the pictures were very similar at first:



But even that was enough to use machine learning for this task.





Hamm used the Amazon DeepLens camera and set it above the entrance to detect the Metric.



With the help of the camera, some 23,000 photographs of Metric were taken in a few months, which Hamm divided into three models for machine learning and creating the right algorithm for artificial intelligence of a smart blocker.











Now the smart blocker understands that the Metric is walking around or comes back without prey or having a successful hunt, closing the cat door for a while, if the cat comes with a busy mouth.

In addition, the camera removes Metric and sends images to the owner.

Also, a smart blocker sends donations to the bird protection organization Audubon Society in case of fixing the metric with dead birds.

For five weeks, a smart blocker four times did not let Metric into the house with a dead animal in his mouth, once let in.

Statistics such here turned out:



However, it was not without problems - at least once, by mistake, the blocker locked the cat on the street without a prey.



Ben wants to try further teaching the AI ​​algorithm based on data about other cats to help people get rid of this problem.

Here are just cats, too, will look for loopholes in the system ... probably.



By the way, this lock with two cats will no longer be particularly functional, as an option, you need to add an additional gateway at the entrance or add a second door to separate their simultaneous return. But this is another task ...