A group of researchers at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology have presented a proof-of-concept for the first flying shopping cart.
It's just a platform or wire basket mounted on drones to help you transport your groceries or other items; this is The Pallentrone, a portmanteau of "pallet" and "drone."
Okay, so it's not quite as exciting as the flying car you've been waiting for since childhood. But it's something. As IEEE Spectrum explains:
The way this thing works is fairly straightforward. The Palletrone will try to keep its roll and pitch at zero, to make sure that there's a flat and stable platform for your preciouses, even if you don't load those preciouses onto the drone evenly. Once loaded up, the drone relies on you to tell it where to go and what to do, using its IMU to respond to the slightest touch and translating those forces into control over the Palletrone's horizontal, vertical, and yaw trajectories. This is particularly tricky to do, because the system has to be able to differentiate between the force exerted by cargo, and the force exerted by a human, since if the IMU senses a force moving the drone downward, it could be either. But professor Seung Jae Lee tells us that they developed "a simple but effective method to distinguish between them."
Since the drone has to do all of this sensing and movement without pitching or rolling (since that would dump its cargo directly onto the floor) it's equipped with internal propeller arms that can be rotated to vector thrust in any direction.
The Palletrone is still in the very early prototyping stages. As of press time, it's unclear if little kids will still be able to ride through the grocery store in a little wire basket on the back of the drone-powered kid. But hey, what could possibly go wrong?
Finally, A Flying Car(t) The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere [Evan Ackerman / IEEE Spectrum]
The Palletrone Cart: Human-Robot Interaction-Based Aerial Cargo Transportation [Geonwoo Park, Hyungeun Park, Wooyong Park, Dongjae Lee, Murim Kim, and Seung Jae Lee / IEEE Robotics and Automation]
