This Man Uses An AI-Enabled Cat Flap To Prevent His Cat From Bringing Home Dead Animals

Machine learning and AI have lots of cool applications that one can make use of to solve problems that none of the commercial product can. In the case of Ben Hamm, a product manager at Amazon, the technology has helped him stopping his adorable but murderous cat Metric from bringing dead or near dead prey to the house and wake him up.

Metric loves to bring dead animals home, at 3 A.M, once every ten nights. Hamm got the cat for two reasons; first, Metric is cute, and second, his apartment had a rat infection issue. Many people suggested solutions like collars and curfew but none of them worked on Metric.

Hamm talked about his solution to this little problem at Ignite Seattle, and here is his presentation:

All Metric does is to follow his feline instinct, but dead animals in the house are unacceptable. That is why Hamm added a camera with AI support to the door cat flap, as well as a locking system powered by Arduino.

Hamm trained the camera's machine vision algorithms on his own. They will identify when Metric goes out or comes in the house, and more importantly if he has prey with him. If the cat does have a kill, the cat flap will be locked for 15 minutes, and the system will send Hamm a text. It also sends “blood money,” a sum of donation to the National Audubon Society, the organization that keeps the birds cats usually hunt for safe.

The presentation Hamm gave was short, but it does give us an idea of how AI can be used for everyday problems. In the case of Hamm, you just need a little thought and expertise to prevent a cat from dragging dead birds home.