By Minwoo Park
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean researchers have developed a transport drone that flies on multiple flexible rotors and corrects itself to stay level during flight and can be used as a “flying shopping cart” to transport goods over uneven terrain such as stairs.
The prototype, developed by a team from Seoul National University of Science and Technology, has a cargo platform mounted atop a multi-rotor drone and handled by a person who uses soft force to guide the hovering aircraft.
Members of the team demonstrated the floating platform with a handle much like that of a shopping cart, which could be used to move objects up and down stairs and load boxes on top of it while it hovered in the air and maintained its balance with using an algorithm for estimating the center of mass.
To move objects over uneven terrain or stairs when a wheeled cart can’t, the drone responds to human control with what the developers call a physical human-robot interaction technique that anticipates human intentions for smooth flight, says Lee Seung- jae, professor of mechanical systems. design technique.
But the broader focus of Lee’s team is not on developing a shopping cart that can be used over stairs, but on applications that use a drone with reliable horizontal stability without pitching and rolling.
“The Palletrone can be more than a flying shopping cart,” he said, referring to the name the team gave the prototype by combining the words pallet, the platform for cargo above it, and drone.
Lee’s team has tested a platform that can carry objects up to 3 kg (6.6 lbs), and admits that commercial applications for freight transport with such a small weight that can easily be carried by people are limited.
Still, the mechanism that allows the drone to change direction in flight without tilting and maintaining a level attitude has applications for delivering sensitive or fragile payloads, Lee said.
But Lee’s team is looking further ahead to the technology’s potential use for unmanned ‘flying taxis’ that transport people and for drones that ‘refuel’ in mid-air, by replacing the batteries so the aircraft doesn’t have to return to base to return for a new load.
Multi-rotor drones are inherently limited in speed and range compared to fixed-wing drones, but have better control and maneuverability, including the ability to hover in flight.
They have been used to transport cargo, food, and medical supplies, but commercial applications are largely limited because it is impractical to increase the size of the battery enough to carry a heavier load over a longer distance.
Seoul Tech’s work was published this year in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers based in New York.
(Reporting by Minwoo Park; Editing by Jack Kim and Jamie Freed)
