Have you ever been to the grocery store and found yourself just incensed that your shopping cart was in near-constant contact with the ground, wasn’t annoyingly loud, and had no ability to run out of battery power? Sure you have, we all have. But what can you do, other than passive-aggressively shoving your cart so hard into the cart return corral that it flops over on its side?

Until very recently, I’d have said that’s the best modern cart technology can do. But now, thanks to a group of researchers from Seoul National University of Science and Technology in Korea, there’s hope! Geonwoo Park, Hyungeun Park, Wooyong Park, Dongjae Lee, Murim Kim, and Seung Jae Lee have collaborated on a paper called “The Palletrone Cart: Human-Robot Interaction-Based Aerial Cargo Transportation, and based on their findings, I think there may be a better way.

The researchers have developed something that is essentially a hovering grocery cart, called, somewhat oddly, the Palletrone (a portmanteau of pallet and drone). The Palletrone is very much just a hovering cart, in that it does not guide itself on its own, rather requiring input from the human to steer it and get it moving.

Here’s the abstract from their paper:

This letter presents a new cargo transportation solution based on physical human-robot interaction utilizing a novel fully-actuated multirotor platform called Palletrone.

The platform is designed with a spacious upper flat surface for easy cargo loading, complemented by a rear-mounted handle reminiscent of a shopping cart. Flight trajectory control is achieved by a human operator gripping the handle and applying three-dimensional forces and torques while maintaining a stable cargo transport with zero roll and pitch attitude throughout the flight.

To facilitate physical human-robot interaction, we employ an admittance control technique. Instead of relying on complex force estimation methods, like in most admittance control implementations, we introduce a simple yet effective estimation technique based on a disturbance observer robust control algorithm.

We conducted an analysis of the flight stability and performance in response to changes in system mass resulting from arbitrary cargo loading. Ultimately, we demonstrate that individuals can effectively control the system trajectory by applying appropriate interactive forces and torques. Furthermore, we showcase the performance of the system through various experimental scenarios.

What’s especially interesting about this is the control system, which reads the various torques and pressures exerted on the guiding handle by the human guiding the hovering platform, while at the same time differentiating those forces from the forces applied by the cargo on the platform itself, which is designed to remain steady and level no matter what, even if the cargo atop it is unbalanced.

And, speaking of cargo on top, the researchers claim that even if the entire Palletrone is covered in objects, airflow to the rotors only decreases by 5%, thanks to the intakes all along the sides, which, in a happy accident of skeuomorphism, make it look a bit like the shopping carts we’re all familiar with.

This is all quite impressive, and you can see the thing in action – admittedly slow and careful action – here, all narrated by one of those synthesized voices:

As you can see from the video, which helpfully shoves a conventional shopping cart down some stairs, satisfyingly, at about 12 seconds in, the big advantage of the Palletrone is that stairs don’t phase it, rough terrain doesn’t bother it, and you’ll never send your groceries skittering out across the parking lot because you didn’t see a curb in one of these.

The tests shown in the video seem to have payloads of about 6.6 pounds of cargo, which is not a whole lot, but it’s a start. No mention is made of how long the batteries last, though the team did develop a system where another drone could fly over to the cart and swap in a new battery:

That seems like a lot of activity to happen in a grocery store aisle, but perhaps it makes sense in those warehouses that are full of staircases.

I’m sort of conflicted about whether or not I think these are a good idea, or if they’re ridiculous. These kinds of hover-carts have been showing up in sci-fi movies and other media for decades, and I always thought they were sort of silly; for all the tech required to make something that just floats, using anti-gravity or some other exotic tech, you’d think that it would be trivial to make it self-propelled or something, but usually they’re not, they’re just floating carts.

Are they that much better than wheeled carts that take no energy? I guess it all depends on the terrain? I guess as soon as you introduce stairs or some other sort of uneven ground into the equation, these start to make sense.

Will these be as easy to steal from grocery stores, though, or will they just cut power when they hit some sort of geofence? Will they be able to slide into the sides of cars as well? Or if lost, will they just keep rising up and up and eventually ding the doors of a 737?

I’m curious to see how this progresses; the capabilities of self-stabilizing propeller-driven drones are already far more impressive than I’d ever have guessed, so who knows, maybe these things will finally free us from the tyranny of squeaky wheels and not being able to barrel down an escalator full-speed with a shopping cart filled to the top with snacks.

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