An Amazon engineer made an AI-powered cat flap to stop his cat from bringing home dead animals

Authored by theverge.com and submitted by mvea
image for An Amazon engineer made an AI-powered cat flap to stop his cat from bringing home dead animals

Machine learning can be an incredible addition to any tinkerer’s toolbox, helping to fix that little problem in life that no commercial gadget can handle. For Amazon engineer Ben Hamm, that problem was stopping his “sweet, murderous cat” Metric from bringing home dead and half-dead prey in the middle of the night and waking him up.

Hamm gave an entertaining presentation on this subject at Ignite Seattle, and you can watch a video of his talk above. In short, in order to stop Metric from following his instincts, Hamm hooked up the cat flap in his door to an AI-enabled camera (Amazon’s own DeepLens) and an Arduino-powered locking system.

The camera was loaded with machine vision algorithms trained by Hamm himself. They identified whether Metric was coming or going and whether he had prey in his mouth. If the answer was “yes,” the cat flap would lock for 15 minutes and Hamm would get a text. (In a nice flourish, the system also sends a donation, or “blood money” as Hamm calls it, to the National Audubon Society, which protects the birds cats love to kill.)

It’s a short presentation, but it perfectly illustrates the everyday utility of AI. As Hamm shows, a little bit of intelligence can go a long way — it can even outsmart a cat.

drinkit_or_wearit on July 1st, 2019 at 00:45 UTC »

Cat learns to back up through the door while dragging his prey.

CAT NOT ON APPROACH

algernonsflorist on June 30th, 2019 at 22:46 UTC »

AI needs to get applied to traffic lights ASAP. In a week it could learn to move traffic so much better than the current system. The other day I spent 8 of my 12 minute drive to work being the only car sitting staring at an empty intersection, it drives me insane.

Blood_Bowl on June 30th, 2019 at 21:56 UTC »

Nobody outsmarts a cat for long. Cat's gonna start his programming career soon.