Mosquito Laser Robots: From Bed Nets to ABB Arms

This autumn a Chinese start-up is due to ship its first batch of a consumer mosquito laser, a box that tracks mosquitoes in flight and shoots them down with a beam. This post traces how people have fought mosquitoes at home, from bed nets in ancient Egypt to bug zappers and insecticide fogging, and how the Photonic Fence research at Intellectual Ventures turned the idea of a laser defence into working prototypes. Then it looks at today's camera and laser devices such as Bzigo and Photon Matrix, and at where industrial robots like ABB's could help build and test them.

An Aedes aegypti mosquito feeding on human skin. Photo: James Gathany / CDC via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How people kept mosquitoes away before robots

The ancient Greeks had a word, konopeion, for the mosquito curtains used in Egypt along the Nile, and it is the root of the English word canopy. Ronald Ross showed in 1897 that mosquitoes carry malaria, which gave the net a medical purpose. Insecticide-treated bed nets now do much of the work: a 2025 analysis by the Malaria Atlas Project credited them with about 72 percent of the malaria cases averted in Africa between 2000 and 2024. A net is cheap and passive, and it only protects the person under it.

Children under an insecticide-treated bed net, a photo from the President's Malaria Initiative, 2015. Photo: President's Malaria Initiative via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The 20th century added chemistry and electricity. Towns and military bases sprayed insecticide fog from trucks and hand foggers. The bug zapper put an ultraviolet lamp inside two wire grids charged to about 2,000 volts, so an insect drawn to the light bridges the gap and is electrocuted. It kills plenty of insects, but few mosquitoes. In a University of Delaware study, six zappers killed 13,789 insects over 15 summer nights, and only 31 of them were biting insects. Mosquitoes find people by the carbon dioxide and water vapour in their breath, and ultraviolet light does little to attract them.

An insecticide fogging machine at work at RAAF Base Darwin in 1962. Photo: kenhodge13 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first serious attempt at a robotic answer came from Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington. Around 2007, after a request from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work on malaria, astrophysicist Lowell Wood proposed shooting mosquitoes with lasers. The team built the Photonic Fence, a set of posts with optical sensors that spot an insect, estimate its size and measure its wingbeat frequency. That is enough to tell a mosquito from a bee, and even a biting female from a male, before a laser fires. Nathan Myhrvold showed it at TED in February 2010, and the same month National Geographic published slow-motion video of the laser hitting mosquitoes.

Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures, who showed the Photonic Fence mosquito laser at TED in 2010. Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Camera and laser mosquito devices today

The Photonic Fence never became a home product. Later reports said the project had turned to agriculture, with a prototype tested at a US Department of Agriculture site against the Asian citrus psyllid, a pest of citrus trees. The home market went to smaller start-ups. Israel's Bzigo, founded in 2016 by Nadav Benedek, showed its device at CES in January 2020. It uses a wide-angle camera and AI to find a mosquito resting in a room, points a Class 1 laser at it and sends a notification to your phone. You still have to swat it yourself.

A female Aedes aegypti mosquito, a carrier of dengue, on skin. Photo: James Gathany / CDC via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The device in the news this autumn goes further. Photon Matrix, a start-up in Changzhou, China, combines lidar, millimetre-wave radar, AI vision and a laser steered by galvanometer mirrors. New Atlas reported on 24 August 2026 that it covers a 90 degree fan out to 6 metres and is meant to hit insects as small as 2 mm flying at up to 1 metre per second. The outdoor blue laser model costs $1,088 and an indoor infrared version $988. On 1 October the South China Morning Post reported that the company expected to make 3,000 to 5,000 units a month and ship its first batch later in October.

An ultraviolet bug zapper hanging under the roof of a highway rest area in Florida. Photo: DanTD / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make mosquito lasers, and we found no ABB link to these companies, so what follows describes possibilities. A device like Photon Matrix is a small precision product: a lidar unit, a radar board, cameras, a laser module and two tiny mirrors that must be aligned exactly. That is the kind of small-part assembly ABB designed the dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 for, and a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could run end-of-line tests on each unit. Our post on PCB assembly cells shows how they handle boards and connectors.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

What comes next for laser mosquito control

Lasers already do other pest control jobs. Farms now use camera-guided lasers to burn weeds, a story covered in our post on laser weeding robots, and the Photonic Fence team aimed its sensors at crop pests. The same sense, identify and fire loop could serve public health. Health workers already set mosquito traps and count catches to decide where to spray. A network of devices that log every mosquito they detect could give those teams a live map of where mosquitoes are active.

Public health workers and US Marines set up a mosquito surveillance trap during Task Force Koa Moana 21 in 2021. Photo: U.S. Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Safety is the biggest open question for homes. A laser strong enough to kill an insect is strong enough to hurt an eye, so these devices depend on software that confirms the target and stops firing when a person or pet is in the beam path. New Atlas noted that the maker did not state an eye-safety rating for the outdoor blue laser. Testing that logic thoroughly is a natural job for automation. Engineers already check robot cells in RobotStudio before they run, and a test rig could use an arm to move targets through a device's field of view thousands of times.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 connecting test equipment to a refrigerator. Photo: ABB

Cost is the other limit. At around a thousand dollars, a laser tracker costs many times more than a bed net or a zapper, which puts it out of reach for most households in the places where malaria and dengue are common. Volume production is what lowers prices for electronics, and that is where automated assembly with arms like YuMi and GoFa would matter most. For now, the insecticide-treated bed net is still the device behind most of the malaria cases averted in Africa since 2000.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com