The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere

22 pointsposted 2 days ago
by sohkamyung
(spectrum.ieee.org)

13 Comments

schobi

5 minutes ago

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.

scottlawson

2 hours ago

To put this in perspective, it supports up to 3kg in the demonstration. That's a fraction of what I can support with one finger.

jalk

an hour ago

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

xeyownt

2 hours ago

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

shermantanktop

2 hours ago

More like a downward pointing leaf blower, driving the dirt from high traffic areas into every corner of the house.

euroderf

43 minutes ago

Scale up the loads, and if it does stairs, unattended, then rent it out for moving days.

hn_throwaway_99

2 hours ago

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.

The whole idea feels very "Juicero" to me.

profsummergig

an hour ago

Step 1: Get the patents.

Step 2: Wait for the tech to mature.

Step 3: $$$

hn_throwaway_99

an hour ago

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.

erulabs

an hour ago

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!

nikolay

38 minutes ago

All the dirt particles from the floor get airborne in an instant - great for allergies and infections!