The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
- 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.
Congratulations, you have invented the helicopter.
You need far greater reaction speeds for a viable quadcopter to remain stable than an ICE, much less a turbojet engine, is capable of.
There has been some project featured on here, I think it was a single-prop chopper, kept hovering and centered just by minutely controlling exactly when torque was created by the motor. Absolutely f..ing nuts.
I recall a video of someone sticking a RC chopper rotor to a fixed-wing model aircraft and turning it into a thrust vectoring propeller with software, giving the plane ability to pull some unique acrobatics.
> You need far greater reaction speeds for a viable quadcopter to remain stable than an ICE, much less a turbojet engine, is capable of.
You can split the problem in two: use ICE to generate thrust, vector it with passive elements on fast-reacting electric servos. Or, you can retain all the electric hardware, but replace the battery with an ICE generator and a gas tank - the main problem here is reducing weight, and gasoline has much better energy density than batteries.
You will probably want to feed a generator and some small battery pack.
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
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?
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.
With just a itty bitty bit more funding!
We do that in America too:
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.
The whole idea feels very "Juicero" to me.
Step 2: Wait for the tech to mature.
Step 3: $$$
That is, how is this tech supposed to "mature" in any way to be actually commercially viable or an improvement upon much simpler methods for "moving stuff around"? Anything that ups the load means you're going to essentially have a giant copter you have to push around.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are cool algorithms used for the stabilization and "push-sensing" features, but I can't see how in any possible universe that this tech will be viable for the purported use case.
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[0] - think terrain looking like this:
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---------\You just need a bigger wheel.
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(Star Trek avoided this fate by having World War 3 happening in between today and warp drive.)
Doesn't need to be commercially viable, military viable is more than enough. Stick a gun or two on it and you got a version of the recent Ukrainian breakthrough "Fury" UGV [1] that doesn't depend on maneuverable terrain. Or combine it with some wheels to create a two-way vehicle that can drive efficiently on somewhat decent terrain but "air hop" over obstacles.
Something like 30 minutes of flight time should already be no issue, that's enough to clear a trench.
Warfare was always nasty to begin with, but since the advents of robotic vehicles being used against humans... phew.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/09/19/ukraines-gu...
Palletrone is by all means a demonstrator that the idea is possible, an utter MVP.
> And in cases where you would want flight capability, why wouldn't you just use a standard aerial drone (obviously used already to great effect in the Ukraine war)?
The key thing IMHO is the fusion of aerial and ground movement. A gun on wheels is nice but it's immediately stopped in its tracks by anything from swampy terrain ("rasputiza") over a random trench to hedgehogs [1], not to mention mines. Give it aerial capability, even if it's just enough to hop over a hedgehog or a smaller river, and the ability to defend itself while airborne, and the game becomes much more serious.
All you need to be is the first one to actually pull it off and hope it's enough of a surprise effect that the enemy gets hindered long enough that you can make some military gain out of it.
Side thought: I wonder how much downforce a drone can actually exert on the ground. Could a heavy enough drone with serious bottom armor be powerful enough to detonate anti-personnel mines without being endangered in the process?
Again, the whole idea presented in this article is that it responds to people pushing on it. What you have just described is what a standard, existing aerial drone is capable of. There is already terrain-following tech that allows a drone to stay at a given height above the ground.
If you have any actual thoughts on how a device like this could ever be relevant in the real world, I'm all ears.
Step 1: Impress investors
Step 2: Get $$$
Step 3: ???
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.
It usually takes years of training to be able to do this.
As for the regime: just lift heavy shit every day and climb one/twice a week
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.
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.
Also, as a reminder to the "do you even lift, bro" crowd, there is an increasing number of aging people with declining physical strength that could potentially benefit from a product like this. Yes, with current drone technology this is too noisy / turbulent / energy inefficient to be entirely practical, but how many of these limits are due to fundamental physics constraints and how many still have quite a bit of room for expansion?
> Also, as a reminder to the "do you even lift, bro" crowd, there is an increasing number of aging people with declining physical strength that could potentially benefit from a product like this.
These people would benefit from lifting too. Physical decline seems inevitable, but its speed seems malleable.
Not for those who're already at the point of needing things like that. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure... except if you're already sick.
All of them.
Even with a 10x increase in battery energy density, you still need to move the same volume of air to generate enough upward thrust for a given weight.
I'll do you better. Every goddamn day I have situations where I have something in my hands that I would like to let go of and have it stay exactly there. I often dream of a magical solution that would let me create small, temporary flat surfaces out of thin air. I envy the astronauts on the ISS; my life feel like one constant shortage of empty flat surfaces.
Of course, this thing is not that either - maybe it would keep my thing suspended where I want it, but the propellers would blow everything else out of where it is.
Velcro is nice too, but it also depends on the microgravity environment - even if I lined every object and every vertical surface I could find with velcro strips, many of the objects would be too heavy to remain in place in 1G.
Hmmm, short of force-field technology, I think there's a slightly different solution which we might be getting close to: A robot assistant that can recognize when it is offered objects, and then returns them. This role may be familiar to anyone who has ever helped a parent do car/home repairs.
Human: "Take this."
Bot: "This looks new, please name the object."
Human: "It's a sprongle wrench."
Bot: "Taking sprongle wrench."
Human: "Give me the sprongle wrench."
Bot: "Here's the sprongle wrench."
____
Back to your flat-surface scenario, perhaps similar system could create virtual shelves or cubbyholes? When you present the robot an item, it remembers the handoff location in space, and moving your hand there again causes it to offer the corresponding object. You'd probably need some sort of augmented-reality display in order to quickly see what's available though.
That's genius, actually! This would solve the problem, as long as the robot is reliably fast and accurate in giving back the right object at the right moment! And as long as it has enough capacity and/or appendages[0].
This reminds me of a related insight that was also enlightening to me when I heard it. It was in one of the SICP lectures, that talked about infinite streams and lazy evaluation[1]. Quoting from the transcript[2], emphasis mine:
"Again, you can ask. Is that data structure integers really all the integers? Or is it is something that's cleverly arranged so that whenever you look for an integer you find it there? That's sort of a philosophical question, right? If something is there whenever you look, is it really there or not? It's sort of the same sense in which the money in your savings account is in the bank."
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[0] - In some 5-10% of cases, I don't just want to temporarily let go of the object - I want it positioned in a specific place for a visual reference. Think instruction manual, a recipe sheet, or a tablet screen. Your robot solution could still solve this, with a few dedicated appendages to hold things in place.
[1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
[2] - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
https://youtu.be/9hvRhZIhFR4?t=14
Great dead-pan comedy! :-D
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.
Maybe games inspire life?
Life: “there’s a reason it’s Sci fi.”
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.
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.
What a missed opportunity. "Palledrone" was right there.
They could have had a portmanteau that's a homophone of palindrome.
What the project lacks in utility it could have made up for in linguistic cleverness.
That said, the clip where two of them hook together to swap a battery is neat. Impractical, but neat.
"THIS IS THE PALLETDRONE" "WHAT?" <inaudible>
https://www.google.com/search?q=utility+cart
or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-1RnUzNRTc
or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiyTf3NdGAU
or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxf-fIubkMs
or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKp4pe92ljg
They just had to choose flying...because that's the most efficient way to lift and move anything. Of course! Brilliant.
A drone with an effectively unlimited runtime would be pretty useful in some narrow applications.
But as a pallet? Come on. Cool technical ideas. But terrible applications.
Yeah, it's snarky but gosh that thing has to be SUPER noisy. I find it annoying when people use leaf blowers outside (yes even electric ones, which are not as bad but you can't blow that much air without the noise) Now having them walking the hallways? That seems like a total non-starter to me.