Build an AI Cat Chaser with Jetson TX1 and Caffe

Fun projects arise when you combine a problem that needs to be solved with a desire to learn. My problem was the neighbors' cats: I wanted to encourage them to hang out somewhere other than my front yard. At the same time, I wanted to learn more about neural network software and deep learning and have a bit of fun doing it. So I set out to build a system that would automatically chase cats out of my yard using artificial intelligence. This boils down to a neural network trained to recognize cats in images from a security camera and turn on the sprinkler system to scare them away. The neural network inference runs on Jetson TX1. This post is an elaboration on and continuation of my notes on the project here.