Tornyol Micro Drone Listens for Mosquito Wings Then Crashes Straight Into Them

Mosquitoes kill more people than almost any other animal on Earth. Diseases they spread take hundreds of thousands of lives every year, mostly in places where chemical sprays and nets only go so far. Two French engineers looked at that problem and decided ordinary toy drones could solve it for far less money.

Alex Toussaint and Clovis Piedallu co-founded Tornyol after years of research on sound and flight control. Toussaint, who as a student constructed one of the first air-based ultrasonic phased-array scanners, later worked in navigation systems for a missile supplier, where he became quite proficient. Meanwhile, Piedallu was investigating the algorithms that keep small aircraft working well. Their plan was simple and sounded excellent on paper: take a little 40 gram drone, give it the capacity to hear a mosquito by the way its wings beat, and just go straight at it.

The detecting system handles all the heavy lifting. These car-parking sensor emitters send out ultrasonic pulses, while hundreds of small smartphone mics arranged in an array listen for the echoes that reflect back. Mosquito wings have a particular micro-Doppler signature, which is a recurring sequence of frequency shifts that no other flying bug matches. The software can read the signature in real time, determine whether it is a mosquito, bee, or fly, and sort by species and sex. Once fixed onto its target, the drone obtains its location and zooms in.

Contact with the target does the rest; the drone does not spray or shock the target, instead using one of its four tiny propellers to whack the bug at high speed, reducing it to a fleeting cloud of wing dust. Moths were utilized as stand-ins during testing since they are rather large and easy to shoot. Toussaint’s new video depicts the first successful mid-air collision, in which the object monitors the target, closes the gap, and strikes neatly within a restricted space. The detection and control bits are already functional; the onboard hardware simply requires some finishing.

Flight time is intentionally kept short; each drone only flies for a few minutes before returning to base to recharge and being sent out again. The system is mainly meant to provide continuous coverage for a garden or patio. According to the inventors, ten of these devices should be sufficient to eliminate mosquitos from an entire square kilometer. That scale is what allows them to claim that they can reduce the cost of mosquito control by a hundredfold when compared to traditional methods.

Everything remains chemical-free and quiet, with the assumption that the drones are small enough to pose no damage to humans or their pets, and the guidelines for targeting beneficial insects are quite simple. When it comes to sensing, the base station does all of the hard lifting, with a 380-microphone phased array and a CPU capable of real-time 3D tracking out to around 8 metres. Later versions try to fit a little more of that capabilities on the drone itself.

Tornyol joined the Y Combinator team in the fall of 2025, and it appears they are already taking reservations. A $100 deposit, which is fully refundable, will place your name on the list of the first home systems to ship in the United States in 2027. Early birds have a limited color selection and a lesser rate after the service is live. Meanwhile, the firm is still looking for people to fill a few key roles, such as control software engineers, hardware designers, and production people, to get the first few hundred units off the shop floor and into people’s actual backyards.
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