Cicada elimanator bot

You might could make one, but why bother. The cicada's defense mechanism is that there are so many of them that it's predators get tired of eating them. I believe it's called predator satiation. Your robot could kill 24/7 and not make an appreiciable dent in the population.

chris > Is anyone going to build a cicada pest killing bot?

Well, you can get an ER1. Then mount it on a base turret. Put a telephoto lens on the webcam. Attach a BB gun with a large hopper of ammo and a compressed air tank. It may be a good idea to use lead shot of the correct size, rather than steel BBs to reduce ricochets and broken glass. Add directional sound sensors with filters for frequency and loudness. Train it to recognize the critters. Call it Bugsniper 2004, and maybe release a video game. Klaus

A million and a half lead pellets per acre? Ever hear of lead poisoning?

Maybe a fertilizer pellet?

Just catch a couple hundred and french fry them. Tastes like chicken.

Ohh spit out the chitin armor its non-digestable.

Why you want to murder those cute little defenseless cicadas? You too violent!

No, then you make a "lead pellet retrieval bot". As with any good engineering project, a solution spawns a host of continuing commercial applications to keep you in the money for decades. Remember Mr. Coffee? And how about that product they attached to the side, "Mr. Fire Extinguisher?"

Cheers!

Sir Charles W. Shults III Xenotech Research

Now *that's* what I call a innovative solution!

Right... That stuff is about as digestable as fingernails.

Start now on a 102 month development program. Aim for 100% overrun - about right for a s/w & h/w project.

PeterS Remove my PANTS to reply.

I was talking about using it near houses. Steel shot would be fine elsewhere.

Actually, chiton absorbs fat. Many diet pills contain powdered arthropod shells.

Why? They'll all be dead in a month anyway. Just enough time to knock together a prototype that you'll stick in a closet for the next 17 years. A prototype that, more than likely, will shoot just about everything _except_ cicadas. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

That would probably be the most effective tool, if each individual cicada kept making noise for a long enough period. From what I've been hearing this time around, though, most individual calls don't last more than a couple of seconds. Definitely need additional sensors, and some good signal processing gear to filter out the background warble from the other millions of cicadas in earshot.

Around here, they like to climb up on automobile tires. So maybe the best robot-based approach is to let them come to you. Put a robot SUV with monster truck tires near some trees, and have it drive around the block every few hours.

-- Carl Burke snipped-for-privacy@mitre.org

Good point. Build a lawyer pest killing bot instead.

Perhaps a noise cancelling bot might provide a better solution unless their mere presence bothers you.

Perhaps you might consider electrified strips to wrap around trees and stakes that you could put out in your local area with the proper spacing so that as they attempt to climb up them to escape their larval exoskeleton they would complete a circuit and be zapped sufficiently.

You might consider breeding and raising a very large number of 'cicada killers' a very large wasp, about two and half inches long, in preparation for 2021. There might be some liability associated with the potential danger involved in releasing them into your local environment however.

Personally I found them quite charming when I was a kid and got to enjoy their songs.

You would not happen to be Cajun would you?

Nope, I'm open minded. I didn't know about the powdered chitin being a fat absorber though.

P.S. I'm really not trying to insult the original poster, it would be interesting to kill insects by remote and if you succeeded the pentagon would probably pay you a a few million for it.

No!!!!

We need all the lawyer-pests we can find to keep the population of lawyers down. :)

-- D. Jay Newman

Actually it's the Trolls who eat the excess lawyers. The pests leave them alone as a matter of professional courtesy.