Sci-fi dreams do come true: Floating shopping carts are here

This early prototype shows a future where your shopping cart can float up the stairs while carrying all of your stuff.

From Back to the Future hoverboards to Star Wars floating speed bikes, floating vehicles have captured the dreams of nerds for decades. And while anti-gravity remains in the realm of fiction, we’re now getting closer to it being a reality. Palletrone, a flying cart developed by researchers at SeoulTech university is not quite the floating platforms seen in sci-fi movies, ferrying boxes of stuff from some storage room to the Millennium Falcon. But it does offer a glimpse into the wild future of shopping, where a hovering cart can push your shopping bags or Ikea furniture without wheels or tracks.

The Palletrone is a drone-based floating cart, designed to hover and transport goods over any terrain and topography, including carting bags of groceries across a flat supermarket floor and lifting mail and packages up office stairs. It remains level while airborne, even when loaded unevenly, and responds to human input through a simple handle like that of a shopping cart. “It’s a flying cart designed for human-robot interaction-based aerial cargo transportation,” say the researchers behind the prototype, which was recently featured in a study recently published in IEEE Robotics And Automation Letters.