Fighting Porch Pirates with Artificial Intelligence

Many of you have experienced the disappointment and anger that comes with being a victim of package thievery. You get that exciting notification from Amazon saying your package is waiting on the porch. You drive home in anticipation of opening up that sweet new video game or pack of toilet paper. But when you walk up to your door, there is no box in sight. You've been burgled! Ryder Damen knows the feeling. To ensure that porch pirates don't go unpunished, he turned to artificial intelligence to unleash righteous vengeance.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that excels at recognizing patterns within enormous data sets. A digital video is nothing more than a series of digital photos, which are large data arrays containing pixel information. Machine learning models don't recognize objects in videos in the same way humans do — they don't understand what they're seeing. But they can detect common pixel patterns that correspond to the pixel patterns of objects they trained on. In this case, Damen trained a Google Cloud AutoML model to recognize boxes and envelopes sitting on his front porch.

Damen's approach here was clever, because his machine learning model doesn't need to detect something as complex as "an unknown human picked up a package and left with it." All it needs to do is see that a package appeared on the porch and then the package disappeared. It is safe to assume that those conditions represent a stolen package. The exception, of course, is when Damen himself picks up the package. To avoid setting the system off on himself, Damen implemented rudimentary facial recognition.

The AutoML model runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, which looks at the front porch through a Wyze security camera. When it recognizes theft, the system sets off a handful of booby traps via relays. A siren sounds, a truck horn blares, and an emergency light illuminates. Damen even reused the lawn sprinkler that we featured previously, which helps soak in flour flung onto the porch pirate by a pneumatic launcher. Yes, the assailant can run away without too much discomfort. But this system grabs the attention of neighbors and should dissuade thieves from burgling Damen in the future.