Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone

And it's here to carry your not-very-heavy stuff

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.

Imagine a shopping cart without wheels that hovers at a convenient height and can be pushed about with ease. Or watch it in action in the video below.

The gadget is the work of boffins from the Mobile Robotics Lab of Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

"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," explain Geonwoo Park, Hyungeun Park, Wooyong Park, Dongjae Lee, Murim Kim, and Seung Jae Lee, in a research paper describing the project.

"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."

Though fascinating to behold, the Palletrone has some obvious drawbacks. Note the hearing protection worn by lab testers in certain parts of the video. Quadcopter drones can make a lot of noise as they churn the air – 60 to 85 dB at 10 meters. Not exactly whisper quiet, and indeed enough damage your hearing.

It would also presumably kick up a bit of dust in some environments.

But more significantly, as noted in IEEE Spectrum, they can't carry much weight. The demo video shows the Palletrone carrying a load of just three kilograms (~6.6 lbs). To support heavier loads, a larger drone is needed – the C100 Heavy-Lift Quadcopter, for example, can support up to 4.5kg or 10 pounds at a size of 64" x 65" x 11."

While drones with higher carrying capacities are available, they tend to be larger, harder to handle, and even noisier.

But don't dismiss the Palletdrone for its obvious problems. It also includes some real novelty in the form of tech that balances three-dimensional forces to maintain zero roll and pitch attitude, even if the weight upon it is unbalanced.

This is detailed in a prior research paper from 2023 by some of the same researchers. The paper describes a center-of-mass position estimation method based on the "extremum-seeking control" algorithm that can keep the hover pallet stable even under varied cargo loads and force inputs.

Encasing the drone in a pallet-like frame has potential as a hovering light cargo carrier – at least in scenarios where noise and wind aren't an issue. But the reason to do so has at least as much to do with safety as utility – it keeps Palletrone pushers from coming into contact with whirling rotor blades.

As the 2023 paper states: "The new design places all propulsion systems inside the fuselage, giving it the additional merit of being safe to people when flying in a populous environment." ®