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.
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 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'll enjoy the stick with a double blade prop on each end, using sub-revolution speed control to do it's thrust vectoring.
The second prop is only needed to counter torque, btw.
Dragging a power cable up and down stairs? Cables are heavy and they snag on stuff. If you ever do a mobile robot project with a tether you quickly discover these are their primary properties.
I really wish such journalists (or their editors) would have to spend a day using that stuff. Any professional who moves stuff around will have their prefered helping technology, be it wagons or a hand cart or whatever, but that stuff?
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
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.
The other thing is, is if there was demand for load-carrying, rough terrain compatible robots, why aren't legged robots like Boston Dynamics' making a dent in the market?
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?
>> 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.
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?
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, besides the battery issues, that a large problem with something that is powerful enough to carry a respectable weight, is that it is also powerful enough to lop your arm off if you’re not careful.
The Irish company Manna have already completed 40,000 fast-food deliveries with a drone that carries 3.5 kg (~8 lb) with ~30,000 cm3. It can fly between 50-65m (165-215ft) above ground and lowers to a height of 15m (50ft) to deliver food via a tether. It achieves a top speed of up to 80 km/h.
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
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.
> 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
its singularity speculation .if the battery gets better, the power source gets smaller or a smaller lift generator gets developed you might be able to exercise upwards lift from the next tesla via patents .
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.
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.
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.
Are you trying to prove my point? The Fury UGV you link to is a gun on wheels, which I see as infinitely more usable and viable than this Palletrone contraption. 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 Fury UGV you link to is a gun on wheels, which I see as infinitely more usable and viable than this Palletrone contraption.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
This is a cart that can climb on its own - which means the person pushing it can climb independently. There's a class of conditions where this combo can work, and wheeled cart won't. Whether this class of conditions is something you'd encounter in practice (as opposed to adapting things to make an existing alternative usable) is another thing; I outlined some potential niche use-cases here[0].
Sure, and this is terrain-following aerial drone tech that also keeps a cargo platform balanced, so why not use it to fly up/over the terrain rather than follow easy path?
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.
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.
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.
20kg is about the weight of a bag of water softener salt. No way am I carrying that from one finger for more than about 10 feet exactly because of the limiting factor you mention.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
--
[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.
Stuff doesn’t stay put on the ISS either. Even if you could let go of something with zero velocity relative to yourself, there are air currents to keep the air safely mixed. Astronauts have Velcro to keep stuff in place. Special fireproof Velcro, IIRC.
You're right. But I'd still go far with the ability for things to stay roughly where I let go of them, for about a minute or two.
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.
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?
Yeah, and that’s a very large volume of air for most interesting payloads. You have to move the same mass of air as the vehicle mass plus the payload mass. That’s a lot of air. Running UAVs indoors in a normal sized room quickly starts large air currents that have to be faught by blowing more air…
> 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.
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’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!
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.
It's a nice piece of classical control theory. No neural nets, just old-style Laplace transforms. This approach might be useful for wheeled devices such as pallet jacks. Those are pushed around by humans, but some have power assist. If you could just push the thing around, but it felt much lighter than it was, that would be useful.
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.
Genuinely I've been thinking about a drone that connects to a backpack with a battery in, and just carries my drink for me. How often do you go to a dinner party and you need three hands, right? Or you're scrambling up Scarfell Pike with a latte?
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?
That's actually a pretty cool idea! I'm envisioning cubes about 10 cm on a side that can lift perhaps 100 grams to 1 kg, with magnetic latching (maybe solenoids controlling stronger latches) so they can self-organize into larger platforms. They'd use ultracapacitors with roughly a 1 second recharge time.
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.
You've taken it further than I was even thinking. There are a lot of potential applications. A micro-drone swarm could aid in construction by moving building materials into place. They could grab a beer from the fridge for you. The only requirement would be proximity to the recharging station (meaning they couldn't, for example, walk your dog).
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.
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.
Because of course I want people to carry around leaf blowers in my office.
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.
Meh. I would rather see terrestrial spider drones with powerful magnets swarming to create a magnetic levitation platform for the pallet. No downdraft, much higher capacity. The drones can go recharge themselves at a nearby base station and scurry back.
> The only non-cgi part of the video was when they showed a regular cart unable to handle plain stairs.
I disagree. The video showing the drone being pushed around by the experimenters is not CGI. It is real footage.
It is weirdly evenly lit, and the cart moves weird of course, so maybe that is why you think it is CGI?
> A place that needs people to carry stuff between levels has elivators and ramps.
Sure. This is more of a “look how clever our controller is” kind of research than a product anyone expects to produce. In other words the outcome here is the learnings from the controller development, not a hovering noisy, windy, dangerous, low-endurance wheelbarrow product.
It is like all those videos where they kick a robot dog and the robot dog keeps walking. They don’t do it because they expect that the future will have a great need for kickable robot dogs, but because it demonstrates how roboust their controller is.
What would be interesting here though is showing the same drone with an off-the-shelf software being pushed the same way. So a software which just tries to stay level and hover at a fixed distance from the ground, but doesn’t have their their clever controller running on it.
Yea I saw the drones pushing eachother. Perhaps I was exaggerating when I said it was all cgi. I just found it amusing that they bothered filming a cart falling down stairs as if its a common everyday problem people encounter and needs some explaining to understand.
To me this is similar to the flying-cars companies.
They all have some weird prototype that can fly for 5 minutes but you never see an actual use or product for them.
What you are doing here is leveling a straight up accusation of fraud against the researchers. An accusation of that magnitude requires extraordinary evidence. A simple claim that the video looks weird is insufficient.
This is how I feel. Most research in hitech is bullshit. I see the pattern of ai voiced cgi video and it looks cheap and inconcrete.
So yea, I'll keep feeling like that, thank you very much
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.