Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone Researchers from South Korea suggest their Palletrone flying platform may someday be useful for light hauling scenarios. As the name suggests, it's literally a pallet – a flat transport structure – suspended in the air by a quadcopter drone. It's not to be confused with the similarly named but Earth-bound Toyota Pallet Drone …
Whilst I enjoy the novelty, I cant really find the use cases for this. If you're anywhere with a path, not even a paved path, a regular pallet jack and a pallet will be faster, easier, quieter and a whole lot cheaper. In an area with an overly rough path for a regular pallet jack, you would probably be looking at a proper fork lift to the job (again faster, easier, quieter, and can carry a ton more).
If we're talking a path you cant get a fork lift through, then I guess we are talking about something reminiscent of going somewhere mountainous or in the bush. But, well are you really going to be able to push the drone along this path, whilst keeping yourself upright? Then wouldn't a normal flying drone be better (or a helicopter for much larger loads, and to reduce the number of trips)?
About the only case that comes to my mind, is going up a set of stairs with a load, but that doesn't seem like anything more than a novelty use case.
Dont get me wrong, I love that this science is being done, and the algorithms they're developing sound pretty awesome, but real world use cases completely pass me by...
The use case for me is not driven by the amount of weight it can carry (not much compared what an abled bodied adult could handle), but that it can carry anything at all. Sounds useful to someone with restricted mobility or upper body strength, it allows them to move light stuff or even carry it with them, over terrain that perhaps a wheeled trolly couldn't handle.
And maybe it can lift stuff higher than a few feet. Could be useful for repeatedly sending stuff up or down greater heights, perhaps tools or light materials on a building site, saving the time for people to climb up and down ladders (and reducing the risk associated with repeatedly climbing ladder, whilst carrying stuff). Not seen the video but I'm imagining "just" a quadcopter that can manage a bit more weight than others. How many jugs of beer could it deliver to a table across a crowded bar I wonder?
Looks like an inverted plastic crate,(the kind in which prepackaged bread is delivered to supermarkets), with a drone hiding under it. ;)
Still an excellent practical exercise for student engineers to apply their knowledge of control theory. From the flowchart in the video with the boxes with functions of (s) also tests their knowledge of Laplace transforms too. :)
I noticed in the video the platform rose slightly when unloaded and dropped slightly when loaded but importantly didn't oscillate so I assume critically damped (or something equivalent.) I guess the limited extra thrust available from and response time of the drone's rotors determine how fast the platform can react to such disturbances. In futuristic movies the platform wouldn't move. :)
In terms of originality and utility the common garden variety wheelbarrow takes a lot beating. Ancient China took the wheelbarrow to a higher level again.* :)
* See how to downsize a transport network: the chinese wheelbarrow for pictures.
BTW, one of the authors has put a preprint of the Palletrone paper (8 pages, pdf) on his github page Human-Robot Interaction-Based Aerial Cargo Transportation (8 pages, pdf) with all of the control system's glorious math .... (wow!) -- worth a gander.
Well it's pretty useless then. Air skates (a mini hovercraft pallet bed) let you move a washing machine around a warehouse with almost no effort. This looks like they have created clever stability control for something that will not make any economic sense to use.
Certainly someone has been trying to do the Star Wars style of transportation. Although we haven’t got carbonite freezing sorted yet.
I can see this having a lot of uses in the future once the load capacity is up to something more practical. I mean it needs a nice woven fabric cover and then you have a flying carpet.
Exactly
Except it's kind of difficult without the anti-gravity generator.
Now for really impressive next gen tech...
Around the turn of the century they genetic code for the sperm motor was decoded. Each one generates about 0.1 nano Newtons of force and is powered by ATP, like a lot of biological systems.
So (in principle) a tank of bacteria could turn out the roughly 100 terra motors (or 1.66 x 10^-10 Moles of them) needed to lift a 100Kg mass.
No one seems to have done any work on the framework you'd need to mount them in, or the fluid supply system, but if someone wanted to....
BTW this would give an actual back-to-the-future style hoverboard as well if someone can figure out the control problem (which with no controls is going to be "challenging")
This sounds like one of these working but useless sorts of inventions. A much earlier example was the hovercraft wheelbarrow.
https://youtu.be/OmJ-8JMw_l4
This idea came about from the common tendency of builders to erect houses first, then roads afterwards thus ensuring that everything was done in a sea of mud. The hover-barrow solved the problem of shifting things about over liquid mud, but when someone had the completely obvious idea of measuring up an estate before any machinery came onto site, then installing roads, then using these roads as access for building equipment then the sea of mud disappeared and with it the need for the hover-barrow.
Hovercraft remain in this tiny niche of "looks useful, but what do we use it for?" and quad-copters are in the same "Solution looking for a problem" niche.
Deliveries by drone belong very firmly on the list of Things That Are Never Going To Happen. If someone's hyping up the technology, it should be treated as at best, a distraction; and at worst, a way to persuade competitors with shallower pockets to invest in a technological dead end, in order to hasten their demise and lower the asking price for their remains.
Drones are by necessity not very well-protected. Which means, in turn, neither is whatever they are carrying. Even if you manage to make the delivery vehicle cheap enough to regard as disposable, all the real value is in the payload. A human being on a bicycle is much better equipped defensively. Especially under the threat of a bollocking -- and not being able to afford anything to eat -- if they fail to deliver the cargo. You don't even have to supply the bike.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
