Flappie AI Cat Door Stops Your Pets from Giving You Dead Rats

Finding weird pet-related tech is a CES tradition, and this year is no exception. Take Flapie for example. The Swiss startup is showing off an artificially intelligent cat door that automatically locks if your kitty tries to bring back prey caught from outside.

On the outward-facing side of the door, you’ll find a motion sensor and night vision camera. Flappie says that over the years it has compiled a “unique and proprietary” dataset with a focus on diversity – meaning obtaining many different species of cats and prey and photographing them in a variety of different lighting conditions. The company says its AI detection system is more than 90 percent accurate, which means your cat could still get a mouse. But hopefully this will happen a lot less often.

There are some manual switches on the inside of the door so you can lock and unlock it and turn off the prey detection system at any time. Eventually, Frappi said, pets may be trained to be inaccessible while carrying something, and then when they drop prey, the door will immediately open so they can get inside. (One of Flappie’s co-founders admitted that a smart cat might find a way to put down the mouse, open the door, pick it up, and run in. But no solution is foolproof, right?)

Photo by Nathan Ingraham/Engadget

Flappie has also incorporated chip detection into its cat door. So if your pet is microchipped, you can program it to open the cat door only for your specific pet. Of course, there’s also an app that lets you control the door from your phone. But if you don’t want to connect the Fappie door to the Internet, it can still operate through the control of the door itself.

To start, Flappie plans to launch pet doors in Switzerland, Zurich and Germany later this spring, with plans to expand from there as it scales up production. A U.S. launch is part of the roadmap, but there’s no word yet on when that might happen, or how much the Flappie Doors might cost when they get here.

We will provide live coverage of CES 2024, which will be held in Las Vegas from January 6th to 12th.Get all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/the-flappie-ai-cat-door-stops-your-pet-from-gifting-you-dead-mice-033237654.html?src=rss

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