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.

The funny thing is that (power density) isn't even the only single obvious and insurmountable problem. What about:

1. The fact that carrying larger loads would make this extremely noisy, making it nearly impossible to use anywhere indoors.

2. Similarly, as another commenter said, if you scaled up the load capacity, then you'd basically be creating a hurricane in any enclosed space.

3. Thus, if all you are left with is outdoor applications, this device compares negatively in nearly every way with a standard delivery aerial drone.

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.

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

https://www.manna.aero/ https://www.dronewatch.eu/bobby-healy-manna-drone-delivery-w...

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

We do that in America too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-25_Stingray

> that the team is totally working on solving it any day now.

With just a itty bitty bit more funding!

I think of it as betting that antigravity is just around the corner. Not a bet I'd make, but I do admire the gumption.

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 .

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.

Step 1: Get the patents.

Step 2: Wait for the tech to mature.

Step 3: $$$

completely unloaded. It’s noisy as fuck.

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

Nice but a bit noisy it seems. Also I’m not sure as is it can keep the surface horizontal in a staircase.

The one thing they don't tell you about the hoverbarrow is what happens once you're on a downslope

The Boston dynamics robots seem like they could have plenty of utility in a mountainous environment. It seems like it would be quite possible

You might enjoy the movie "Young Ones" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Ones_%28film%29

If they made it more stable, you could use it to move your nitroglycerin around, in 3kg batches

Ok, but it's cargo AND vacuum cleaner. Can your finger do that?

Now you got me curious - how many kg can you support with a single finger, and what's your exercise regime?

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".

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.

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?

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.

The control scheme is the point of the paper.

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.

Sci fi: “what about…”

Life: “there’s a reason it’s Sci fi.”

I, for one, thought of a similar concept from Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

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.

It looks like an undergraduate research project. The kind of thing that is a curiosity for a professor or student.

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.

Big quadcopter drone up close loud, that is, very.

Heh, this was my first thought too.

> 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.

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.