The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere

[CommieBobDole]

The best thing about articles describing "technology that would be incredible except for the one obvious and insurmountable-with-current-technology problem that makes it absolutely useless and is the reason that nobody else did this" is the inevitable point where they admit that it's absolutely useless because of the obvious and insurmountable problem but that the team is totally working on solving it any day now.

In this case the problem is that it only carries 3kg and has almost no battery life, but the team is working on another drone that follows it around and changes the batteries when they run out, so eventually for the minimal cost of two of these and like a million batteries you can carry 3kg indefinitely. Or you could just carry it with your hands for free.

[TeMPOraL]

The problem is surmountable in narrow cases in a quite easy, if for some reason non-obvious, way: ditch the battery and plug it in to AC power. This would also give it extra carrying capacity, bringing it up to, say, to 10kg. Now this still isn't much, and it would be compromising stability a bit (especially outdoors) due to reduced inertia, but I can think of couple narrow applications:

- Actually carry stuff up the stairs. Sure, lifts and wheelchair lifts already exist, but not everywhere. If the proliferation of cars over the last century taught us anything, it's that worse solutions that require less or zero construction changes on-site win. Classic "worse is better".

- Ferry light cargo across long but thin stretches of impassable terrain. Think military or EMTs moving supplies back and forth over a river, construction crew moving small stuff up the steep mountainside. Sure, there exist solutions for this already, but they're bulkier and more expensive to set up; for the drone, all you need is a generator and a long power cable.

(Yes, I'm stretching credulity here a bit. Yes, this particular product makes little sense as-is, but the idea of a stabilized drone platform isn't, in general, entirely bad.)

Side question: what if they replaced the batteries and electric motors with gas tanks and an ICE? Maybe that could give it more useful carrying capacity, at the expense of noise and being unsexy to modern environmental sensibilities.

[hn_throwaway_99]

The funny thing is that (power density) isn't even the only single obvious and insurmountable problem. What about:

1. The fact that carrying larger loads would make this extremely noisy, making it nearly impossible to use anywhere indoors.

2. Similarly, as another commenter said, if you scaled up the load capacity, then you'd basically be creating a hurricane in any enclosed space.

3. Thus, if all you are left with is outdoor applications, this device compares negatively in nearly every way with a standard delivery aerial drone.

[atoav]

I really wish such journalists (or their editors) would have to spend a day using that stuff. Any professional who moves stuff around will have their prefered helping technology, be it wagons or a hand cart or whatever, but that stuff?

Unless your usecase is to deliver a sixpack of beer across a minefield any other solution will work better and that includes putting your stuff on a tablecloth and dragging it across the floor

[regularfry]

I would think that the fact that the downdraft will make this completely useless in any environment that has any small objects untethered within about a 2m radius also falls into that category.

[akavi]

The other thing is, is if there was demand for load-carrying, rough terrain compatible robots, why aren't legged robots like Boston Dynamics' making a dent in the market?

They're strictly superior than the hoverbot on battery life and carrying capacity, are there other downsides I'm missing? Or is there just plain not a market for this thing?

[sandworm101]

>> only carries 3kg and has almost no battery life

Don't worry. They will used beamed microwave power delivery. The operator will just have to wear a 2.5kg lead apron to protect themselves. When used for food delivery, the power delivery beam will also act as an effective heat lamp.

[Aeolun]

I think, besides the battery issues, that a large problem with something that is powerful enough to carry a respectable weight, is that it is also powerful enough to lop your arm off if you’re not careful.

[piltdownman]

The Irish company Manna have already completed 40,000 fast-food deliveries with a drone that carries 3.5 kg (~8 lb) with ~30,000 cm3. It can fly between 50-65m (165-215ft) above ground and lowers to a height of 15m (50ft) to deliver food via a tether. It achieves a top speed of up to 80 km/h.

They posit that one employee can oversee several drones and therefore realize twenty deliveries per hour, ten times as much as a delivery person can achieve on the road in the same time frame

https://www.manna.aero/ https://www.dronewatch.eu/bobby-healy-manna-drone-delivery-w...

For industrial use, we have huge amounts of copy-cats like the HZH Y100 which is a 6-axis, 12-wing transport drone with a maximum load of 100kg and a 90-minute endurance.

[Kon-Peki]

> In this case the problem is that it only carries 3kg and has almost no battery life, but the team is working on another drone that follows it around and changes the batteries when they run out

We do that in America too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-25_Stingray

[solfox]

> that the team is totally working on solving it any day now.

With just a itty bitty bit more funding!

[__MatrixMan__]

I think of it as betting that antigravity is just around the corner. Not a bet I'd make, but I do admire the gumption.

[Log_out_]

its singularity speculation .if the battery gets better, the power source gets smaller or a smaller lift generator gets developed you might be able to exercise upwards lift from the next tesla via patents .

[hn_throwaway_99]

The article mentions this, but I still find it somewhat hilarious that given the very low load capacity of this thing, it would be about 100 times easier to just put the stuff in bags that you wanted to carry. And at the point where you start being able to carry real loads it would be noisy AF.

The whole idea feels very "Juicero" to me.

[taneq]

Also as anyone who’s tried to fly a drone inside in a small room will know, the minor hurricane this creates will cause it to be super unstable as well as making the environment super uncomfortable for everyone in it.

[profsummergig]

Step 1: Get the patents.

Step 2: Wait for the tech to mature.

Step 3: $$$

[throwawayben]

I'll stick with my hoverbarrow, don't need all this AI stuff. https://youtu.be/OmJ-8JMw_l4

[throwaway743]

Love the shot of the dude walking through the neighborhood without a care. Just imagining 5 of these being used at the same time, on the same block, starting early morning through the afternoon. People would go mad lol

[psychoslave]

Nice but a bit noisy it seems. Also I’m not sure as is it can keep the surface horizontal in a staircase.

[btbuildem]

The one thing they don't tell you about the hoverbarrow is what happens once you're on a downslope

[bloopernova]

I think a better pallet-drone would be a 4 or 6 legged thing that just goes where you push it. Up stairs, over obstacles, across rocky paths, fords rivers, and tiptoes through forest underbrush.

Not exactly related: I've been reading about WW2 and just finished a book on the Sicily/Italy campaign. The mountains caused massive loss of life because defensive positions were so difficult to dislodge. Very much the same as the "fight for every hilltop" carnage in the Pacific theater. I was wondering if a "mech" would even work on mountainous areas, whether it had 2, 4 or 6 legs. It seems like you'd need something with the agility and sure-footing of a mountain goat.

[colechristensen]

The Boston dynamics robots seem like they could have plenty of utility in a mountainous environment. It seems like it would be quite possible

[thegabriele]

You might enjoy the movie "Young Ones" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Ones_%28film%29

[scottlawson]

To put this in perspective, it supports up to 3kg in the demonstration. That's a fraction of what I can support with one finger.

[jalk]

If they made it more stable, you could use it to move your nitroglycerin around, in 3kg batches

[xeyownt]

Ok, but it's cargo AND vacuum cleaner. Can your finger do that?

[falcor84]

Now you got me curious - how many kg can you support with a single finger, and what's your exercise regime?

[sharpshadow]

It’s probably very noisy and will be a mess when dirt and dust is involved.

I like a similar but different idea where you have a little flying companion which follows you, can sit on you shoulder, recharge and return, follows commands.. something like a flying phone.

[ActionHank]

Also very little weight can be moved with a drone as the more powerful it gets, the bigger the batteries need to be which decreases the amount additional of weight you can move.

[schobi]

I can imagine situations where I hold something, thinking "this needs to go there". Cleanup, but also moving days, gardening, construction. I like the concept of the "luggage from sapient pearwood" - maybe tell it where to go, drop off something and come back? Put a box on it, and it will carry it down the stairs?

This is not it. Needs to be quiet and energy efficient, but still handle stairs and garden... If I need to follow it, I could just use an exoskeleton - no, please make this autonomous.

If you've solved voice interface, navigation, low power.. Then you almost have a humanoid robot who could also put the laundry in the washing machine, not just next to it.

[actionfromafar]

"Conventional wheel-based cargo transportations struggle on uneven terrain, such as stairs."

https://youtu.be/9hvRhZIhFR4?t=14

Great dead-pan comedy! :-D

[nikolay]

All the dirt particles from the floor get airborne in an instant - great for allergies and infections!

[cfgauss2718]

Even if you could get around the payload and energy density (power autonomy) constraints, which are very stringent, this seems like a dead product. Sure, it’s a cool project for some controls engineers. But I can scarcely imagine the deafening noise this thing makes, and no doubt it would tend to kick up clouds of dust anywhere it went, which is hardly desirable from a health perspective. This kind of device would be a permanent irritant in almost any environment. Thankfully, buildings are already well equipped with things like elevators. I’ll keep my wheeled cart, thank you very much.

[erulabs]

I’ve had a long day and for just a split second I was excited for this to be something other than exactly what I expected and exactly what it is. For about 700ms I felt real technological excitement again. Dang. Funny tho!

[gusfoo]

> The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere

No, it really is not. It's a tech demo of moving 3 kilos in an awkward and loud manner, a task that has negative practical value.

[jjk166]

Instead of an elaborate control scheme to differentiate forces from the load versus forces from the operator, why not just put a thumbstick or two on the handle?

[TeMPOraL]

In practice this would end up with something in between. A more "direct" control scheme is nice, but you still need some fail-safe button that makes sure the operator doesn't accidentally kill themselves or someone else when they let go of the handle.

[dialup_sounds]

The control scheme is the point of the paper.

[Animats]

It's a nice piece of classical control theory. No neural nets, just old-style Laplace transforms. This approach might be useful for wheeled devices such as pallet jacks. Those are pushed around by humans, but some have power assist. If you could just push the thing around, but it felt much lighter than it was, that would be useful.

[remoquete]

Not sure if they knew about this or Kojima predicted the future, but a conceptually similar floating carrier was in Death Stranding: https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Floating_carrier

Maybe games inspire life?

[Mistletoe]

This isn’t the only similarity I see between current life and the Death Stranding world. It and Idiocracy seem to be the most prescient looks into the modern world I live in.

Most everyone I know is becoming more and more withdrawn into their house, except for their occasional shipment from Amazon or the grocery store to their front door.

[Waterluvian]

Sci fi: “what about…”

Life: “there’s a reason it’s Sci fi.”

[bleuarff]

I, for one, thought of a similar concept from Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

[iancmceachern]

This takes a huge amount of energy and complexity to solve a barely there problem that is largely already solved.

[robertlagrant]

Genuinely I've been thinking about a drone that connects to a backpack with a battery in, and just carries my drink for me. How often do you go to a dinner party and you need three hands, right? Or you're scrambling up Scarfell Pike with a latte?

[aabajian]

Why not make these much, much smaller, and have the battery swap be part of the design? Connect 100 bee-sized platforms together in a grid. Any one of which could be the "battery swapper" bee and keep the rest of the flock afloat?

[zackmorris]

That's actually a pretty cool idea! I'm envisioning cubes about 10 cm on a side that can lift perhaps 100 grams to 1 kg, with magnetic latching (maybe solenoids controlling stronger latches) so they can self-organize into larger platforms. They'd use ultracapacitors with roughly a 1 second recharge time.

So they'd constantly travel from the base station to the swarm, picking up energy and depositing it to the others. They'd form a platform that can lift appreciable amounts of weight, maybe even 100 kg (a person), and fly forever.

Right now I think drones like that would cost around $100 each. But if they could be made for $10, then conservatively we could have flying platforms for around $10,000. And unlike batteries, the capacitors would last forever.

Not so much grey goo, more like grey girders. I haven't researched this at all yet, if it already exists.

[tempodox]

I've been dreaming of a floating tray for all of my life, albeit in the form of a noiseless fluffy cloud and robust enough for you to sit on. If I'm going to float stuff around, I'll definitely want to float myself, too.

[euroderf]

Scale up the loads, and if it does stairs, unattended, then rent it out for moving days.