STORY: Imagine using a shopping cart on stairs without feeling the bumps.

Enter the ‘Palletrone’ – part cargo pallet and part drone.

It’s essentially a flying shopping cart, developed by a team of researchers at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

Professor Lee Seung-Jae explains how it works.

“This is a conventional multirotor where the propellers are all fixed. So therefore, if you want to go left, it needs to be tilted left. // But however, in this case, this is a Palletrone V3 platform. Each propeller contains a servo mechanism that can control the direction of the thrust. Each propeller all the propellers are containing the servo motor. So therefore, by combining those thrust commands, we can just move the entire platform left to the right without rotating the attitude of the entire platform.”

The Palletrone is meant to be controlled by a person, and can be pushed or pulled by using the handle.

Even with added weight on it.

“So, the Palletrone is not just a flying shopping cart. // It could be used as an air taxi industry, or it could be used as a general base platform for future aerial robotic tasks. And we are also developing a new technology called aerial docking, which can dock during mid-air. And then using this technology, we are now preparing aerial battery change applications, which means that you can maintain a flight even without coming back to the ground and changing the batteries.”

So far, the flying shopping cart has been tested with just under 7 pounds of goods.

It’s not yet strong enough to haul a week’s worth of groceries up stairs.