A robot dog capable of detecting fire ants and eliminating them has been developed by researchers from China’s Lanzhou University.

To enable the quadruped robot to detect and eliminate fire ants — which can cause serious harm and disrupt food chains — the team trained an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) system on fire ant nest images taken from different angles and under various environmental conditions.

Source: Lanzhou University

Once trained, the program was installed onto a quadrupedal Xiaomi CyberDog. Following installation, the robot dog was instructed to survey a 300 square meter nursery garden for ant mounds. As soon as the hives were located, the quadruped “pawed” at the mound, disturbing the ants within so that they emerged from the mound and the researchers could analyze them.

The researchers found that the robot dog outperformed three human-conducted surveys, identifying three times more nests.

An article detailing the robot, “Use of Artificial Intelligence for Automated Detection and Surveillance of Red Imported Fire Ants Nests,” appears in the journal BioRxiv.