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.
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.
>Side question: what if they replaced the batteries and electric motors with gas tanks and an ICE?
Congratulations, you have invented the helicopter.
I know. Specifically, I reinvented gasoline-powered model RC helicopters, that were all the rage before battery-powered quadcopters became a thing, and scaled them up. I.e. I don't recall anyone trying a "palletrone"-like thing with an ICE-based platform, despite the tech for it being mature for like 50 years or so.
> I.e. I don't recall anyone trying a "palletrone"-like thing with an ICE-based platform, despite the tech for it being mature for like 50 years or so.
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 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.
>> 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.
With a powerful enough microwave beam, you could lift and propel the thing through surface ablation and wouldn't need the propellers at all.
Good god, I nearly did a spit take. That's the most irresponsible and horrifying tech idea I've ever heard. That's great, but we can do better- what about Project Orion but for local food delivery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
If we're going for line-of-sight, a more realistic solution would be to ditch the battery and hook it up to mains (or a portable generator); see my longer reply upthread.
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.
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.
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.
The Boston dynamics robots seem like they could have plenty of utility in a mountainous environment. It seems like it would be quite possible
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?
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.
Step 1: Get the patents.
Step 2: Wait for the tech to mature.
Step 3: $$$
Except in this case your "Wait for the tech to mature" step is basically the same "Step 2: ???" from the underpants gnomes.
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.
> 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"?
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...
Yeah you probably need sci Fi anti gravity type device to make something like this possible.
That's the problem, though. Some Zefram Cochrane figures out how to work subspace, but all the profit from antigrav sleds will go to whoever won the patents for a pallet mounted on a quadcopter 40 years earlier.
(Star Trek avoided this fate by having World War 3 happening in between today and warp drive.)
Or you could use wheels to transfer the load directly to the ground, bypassing the need for lifting motors.
Too soon. Wheels aren't retro just yet.
Yes, but wheels don't work for arbitrary terrain, including long enough stretches going vertical or backwards[0], or liquid or gaseous terrain like rivers and large holes in the ground.
--
[0] - think terrain looking like this:
/-----------
\---
\
---------\> wheels don't work for arbitrary terrain
You just need a bigger wheel.
That's why I said "arbitrary" - to mean "bigger than the wheel you have".
No, obviously it goes like:
Step 1: Impress investors
Step 2: Get $$$
Step 3: ???
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.
completely unloaded. It’s noisy as fuck.
I'll stick with my hoverbarrow, don't need all this AI stuff. https://youtu.be/OmJ-8JMw_l4
The one thing they don't tell you about the hoverbarrow is what happens once you're on a downslope
Nice but a bit noisy it seems. Also I’m not sure as is it can keep the surface horizontal in a staircase.
The one in the article is going to be hella loud too though, big drone right in front of you.
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
Or the shoddy work in brick laying. Every stone cutter at their monthly meeting just dropped their head in shame at the haphazardly way it was put together.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The control scheme is the point of the paper.
This takes a huge amount of energy and complexity to solve a barely there problem that is largely already solved.
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.
If they made it more stable, you could use it to move your nitroglycerin around, in 3kg batches
Now you got me curious - how many kg can you support with a single finger, and what's your exercise regime?
If there's a handle you can hook into, anyone can carry ~20kg with a single finger (index or middle finger). For me, the limiting factor would be the handle biting into my finger too hard, but I can likely go up to 40kgs.
I deadlift about 60kg with two fingers (middle), I can easily hang on two fingers (one of each hand), so about 37kg per finger. Some people can do one finger pullups
As for the regime: just lift heavy shit every day and climb one/twice a week
Professional climbers are known for being able to hang off of two fingers.
It usually takes years of training to be able to do this.
It’s one thing to be able to hang off a finger hooked over a tiny ledge, it’s much easier to hook a handle and lift a load vertically. Most adult humans could lift 10kg witha couple of fingers.
Except for a fair comparison with this particular drone, you need a figure for how much you can carry on top of your finger, pointing upwards, while keeping it balanced.
Ok, but it's cargo AND vacuum cleaner. Can your finger do that?
More like a downward pointing leaf blower, driving the dirt from high traffic areas into every corner of the house.
My apartment pays for people to come by and blow dirt around every so often, so maybe this could let delivery people pick up extra cash on the side!
And can your finger AI? Doubt it.
"Conventional wheel-based cargo transportations struggle on uneven terrain, such as stairs."
https://youtu.be/9hvRhZIhFR4?t=14
Great dead-pan comedy! :-D
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.
> I can imagine situations where I hold something, thinking "this needs to go there".
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.
Maybe the next step is to walk a path with it once and then have it repeat it. I often have groceries delivered that require me to walk a dozen times to my basement to stow it away. If I have to do it once for "teaching" and then repeat it 11 more times, that would be a win.
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?
>how many of these limits are due to fundamental physics constraints
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.
Agree that people could benefit from it. However:
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I, for one, thought of a similar concept from Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
Sci fi: “what about…”
Life: “there’s a reason it’s Sci fi.”
Literally re-inventing the wheel.
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!
The only useful part of this might be the mid-air battery-swap tech.
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.
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.
That's great. How do I get it under my refrigerator?
Scale up the loads, and if it does stairs, unattended, then rent it out for moving days.
Imagine how loud this will be
"THIS IS THE PALLETDRONE" "WHAT?" <inaudible>
Heh, this was my first thought too.
I genuinely don't know if this is meant to be real or a joke.
It looks like an undergraduate research project. The kind of thing that is a curiosity for a professor or student.
I don't believe for a second they are actually trying to sell this as a commercial product. It only does 3 kilograms on a platform that has to be open / cannot be fully covered. Upscaling it means a bigger and louder drone.
That said, the clip where two of them hook together to swap a battery is neat. Impractical, but neat.
No audio of the actual thing. How loud is this?
Big quadcopter drone up close loud, that is, very.
Loudest shopping cart ever.
All the dirt particles from the floor get airborne in an instant - great for allergies and infections!
This would be great for bars that completely fill their glasses up to the tippy top...
Neat, it's like the ones from Death Stranding, which you can drag up to two of on a tether behind you carrying additional cargo.
I’ve been waiting years for Tenser’s Floating Disc, but this ain’t it.