If you have pet with a little access door to the outside world, and that pet happens to be a cat, you’re likely on the receiving end of all kinds of lifeless little lagniappes. Don’t worry, it’s CES season out in Las Vegas and a company called Flappie has the solution — an AI-powered cat door that rejects dead mice and other would-be offerings.
It works about like you might expect — there’s a motion sensor and a night-vision camera on the exterior side of the door. Using Flappie’s “unique and proprietary” dataset, the door distinguishes between Tom and Jerry and keeps out unwanted guests with more than 90% accuracy. To do this, Flappie collected video of a lot of cats and prey in a variety of lighting conditions. There’s even a chip detection system that will reject all other cats.
Thankfully, it’s not all automation. The prey detection system can be turned off entirely, and there are manual switches on the inside for locking and unlocking the door at will. You don’t even have to hook it up to the Internet, it seems.
Americans will have to wait a while, as the company is rolling out the door in Switzerland and Germany first. No word on when the US launch will take place, but interested parties can expect to pay around $399.
Of course, this problem can be solved without AI as long as you’re willing to review the situation and unlock the door yourself.
This is not a new idea. The Flo Control Project did the same thing almost a quarter of a century earlier. https://web.archive.org/web/20000229222350/http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm
Not sure anyone claimed it was a new idea. Nice to see a few people attempting it. Since there are commercial doors that use cat recognition to recognise and reject cats that aren’t your pet, I suspect this addition would be trivial for them too. But a nice home project like this is cool to see.
Hey that’s cool. Pretty good design for the time. Thanks for the link – it was fascinating.
I knew I had seen something like this a long, long time ago. Your link is exactly what it was, probably from slashdot or something back in the day
Hope it doesn’t come to the US. Keep your bird-genociding invasive species inside.
That ship has sailed:
https://www.catster.com/guides/how-many-stray-and-feral-cats-are-there-in-the-us/
The problem is the feral cats, not the pets.
Or the wind turbines.
Add buildings with mirror glass walls. I’ve literally seen raining dead birds at a place I worked at.
Literally billions die each year from flying into glass buildings and you’re worried about cats (or others, wind turbines).
Cats do FAR more damage to bird populations, and to more KINDS of birds, than wind turbines (small numbers albeit big birds) or even buildings (still nowhere close to cats).
But sure, make your windows visible to birds. AND KEEP YOUR GODDAMNED CAT INSIDE.
It is irresponsible to let a cat outside unless you have an enclosure that can contain it, and ideally keep small wildlife out as well. It’s dangerous to the cat as well as to the wildlife.
If you don’t like that, then stop breeding the things.
pesticides do more damage to bird populations than cats, by killing the insects the bird live on.
Your cat hates you and dreams of freedom…While sitting sadly in the window considering self OR human harm. She’s hoping you stroke out, so she can eat your face while you’re still alive.
Then when you get to hell, you’ll find out all the cats that hate you are on staff and the size of tigers. You will know how the birds feel.
Cats with access to food get too fat to catch uninjured birds quickly.
I couldn’t agree more. Or better yet, just don’t have a cat.
What does that change? So we just use normal cat flaps instead and we have the dead mice/birds inside and out. Two completely different subjects.
My cat brings in live mice. I don’t get the advantage of this door.
Me either. My pet snakes love em fresh and squirming. And my cat keeps em free since farms often have lots of mice
Just get some rat poison. That solves the cat problem and mice problem.
It looks like Switzerland has a lot of cats and mice. There is another startup called pawly doing the same on kickstarter/indiegogo as it seems. https://www.yourpawly.com
They won’t let the cat in when they have prey in their mouth.
The Swiss are the most rules crazy, clean freaks on the earth. Worse than Germans.
They have government hygiene inspectors that won’t let you leave an apartment when you move out until it’s clean to Swiss standards…Bet the landlords still keep deposits as a routine matter.
You’d think all the blood on the money would bother them, but that’s no problem.
A magnificent gift from a cat? Argh!
Melted down gold fillings? Right this way to the assayers office.
Once the cat brought a bird (Alive) in to snack on it under my bed. I definitely don’t want that.
But another night I had a fierce fight between two cats in the living room. I don’t want that either.
So when I spend that much on a AI cat door, it should also be able to recognize my cat and lock all other animals out.
Well, to lock out other animals you can chip your cat.
“Flappie” seems to support that…
It probably doesn’t prevent a second cat sneaking in behind your own cat before the flap is fully closed…
How do you chip skunks and racoons?
I had my cat chiped, the cat flap was programmed to accept only my cat’s ID. There was another cat in the area that liked beating up mine. My cat would run through the cat flap at speed, and the cat flap was fast enough to unlock, and lock again just after it had gone through to stop the chaser. It happened regularly that I could hear the other cat crash into the cat flap.
Ingest mouse outside…vomit mouse inside. Dumb humans miauahaha. Cool project btw.
Some time ago I saw a youtube video for something like this. A farmer installed such a door, and the cat was so annoyed that he was not allowed to feed his human anymore that he just moved on. The video was made 2 weeks or so after the change.
Yes, you shall consider this from the cat’s point of view.
It is a gift to an alpha, as far as a cat can consider someone an alpha ;-)
It’s very rude to refuse a gift
One of the neighborhood pack gave me a headless squirrel once.
I assume as thanks for all the kibble.
I was touched.
Same problem. Upgraded to puppy. Kids barely noticed missing cat due to puppy Problem solved.
I know which of my neighbours have dogs, because I can hear the damn things barking incessantly. When they’re not barking, they’re shitting all over the sidewalks, or my front lawn.
I don’t know which of my neighbours have cats, because they don’t fret and yap all day, and they don’t shit where people walk.
Have whatever pet you want, but don’t be a dick.
This topic had a write up years ago. Cat had to go through a short tunnel making a clear profile in high contrast background white screen with some fairly simple software doing the recognition. Photos show bird, coon, and other rejects as well as mouse in mouth rejects.
or in my case, not quite dead mice. had one cat that would bring home pets.