Fun student project, but let's say you do spend millions of dollars on R&D to get this into production and released into the wild to target lantern flies eggs.

Fun student project, but let's say you do spend millions of dollars on R&D to get this into production and released into the wild to target lantern flies eggs. * What percentage of eggs in a given area is it expected find and destroy? If it's anything less than ~100% then you are guaranteeing that within a few generations (years) you will be dealing with a population of lantern flies naturally selected for traits that thwart this robot predators hunting strategies. * Taking the cost of R&D, production, deployment, and operation of the first generation, how much economic damage was mitigated before this generation of robot becomes ineffective and needs to be "evolved" to deal with this newer generation of lantern flies? Imo, human beings can't compete in the game of Life with these kinds of strategies and we'd be better off selectively breeding and/or genetically engineering existing predators to preferentially target lantern flies and their egg sacks, instead of building fully autonomous robot predators from scratch.