Towards implementing a complete solution, the company worked in the first year on automating monitoring and surveillance of mosquitoes, along advancing the state-of-the-art sorting and packaging of mosquitoes and prototyping a novel drone release solution, first of its kind.
Specimen of mosquitoes from across the USA, Europe and Israel were sent to the company, realizing partnerships and relations the company established with leading mosquito control departments, for imaging the mosquitoes, creating a unique high resolution digital repository of mosquitoes from different countries. The company further progressed with its sex separator and packaging unit for its second generation, exploring capacity to process several millions of mosquitoes per week by a single unit, an unprecedented capability by any company, globally. Deep learning algorithms were used to train the machine to identify mosquito genus, species, and sex, supporting both the automated monitoring and sorting process. A cloud-based web-platform was developed, providing insights for the user on trap results allowing them to take sound decisions in their mosquito monitoring and control operations.
Senecio has also built a complete demo site, demonstrating all process from mosquito rearing, sorting and packing, to mission planning and release, solving production as well as the logistics and operations for massive distribution. The technologies developed represent the state of the art in mosquito handling, backed by large patent portfolio, filled in multiple countries world wide.
Senecio demonstrated ability to process millions of mosquitoes, automatically, every week, making the end product affordable.
By the end of the project, Senecio signed agreement with the largest pest control company in the world, and is currently releasing sterile mosquitoes in some 5 different cities and planning on further expansion.
