Amazon engineer has created an AI blocking device that keeps cats out of the street


    Amazon engineer Ben Hamm has developed a smart blocker that prevents his cat named Metric from bringing dead birds and rats caught by hunting paws and teeth into the house.

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





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

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

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

    Locking the house Metric is also not an option, since the cat needs to go to the toilet.



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





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



    To mock his beloved cat - Ben did not want to hang a bell on him and multi-colored illumination.



    So, engineering ingenuity and machine learning were used.

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



    Since Metrik quickly climbs along his path to the entrance to the house, the photos were not very clear at first:



    But even this was enough to use machine learning in this task.





    Hamm used an Amazon DeepLens camera and placed it over the entrance to detect Metric.



    Over the course of a few months, about 23,000 photos of Metric were taken with the camera, 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 whether Metric leaves for a walk or comes back without prey or with a successful hunt, closing the cat's door for a while (15 minutes) if the cat comes with a busy mouth.

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

    The smart blocker also sends donations to the Audubon Society, a bird protection organization, in case Metric is dead dead.

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

    The statistics like this turned out:



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



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

    But cats will also look for loopholes in the system ... probably.



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


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