The shopping cart, also known as a trolley or buggy, is one of the most essential tools people use inside stores, especially supermarkets, both for customers as well as store workers. Despite its importance, its design has basically remained unchanged in almost a century, even when that design doesn’t really take the comfort of users in mind. Yes, the four wheels and the spacious metal basket can hold your groceries and take them from one point to another, but they are difficult to control, heavy, and more importantly, unable to climb up or go down the stairs. This prototype tries to address those pain points to make dealing with groceries and packages easier, safer, and more accessible.
Designers: Geonwoo Park, Hyungeun Park, Wooyong Park, Dongjae Lee, Murim Kim, Seung Jae Lee (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)
Shopping carts are so iconic that they have literally become icons in digital stores that don’t have anything to do with wheeling physical objects around. Despite that popularity, they’re not exactly the easiest tools to use and offer only the bare minimum convenience so that we don’t have to carry our groceries. Considering their cheap and mass-produced designs, it’s no surprise that many have damaged wheels that make them difficult to turn. These wheels also don’t let you drive the cart up or down places that don’t have inclined planes for them to roll on.
Palletrone’s solution is to do away with those problematic wheels completely. Instead, it uses a rather large drown to lift a platform that will hold your groceries and boxes. There’s also a cage around the drone to protect humans from those powerful and dangerous propellers. Think of it like an upside-down basket with the drone inside, flying to keep the platform off the ground.
The description might sound simple, but there’s definitely a lot complicated technology involved. For one, the Palletdrone always flies at around the person’s chest height, which means that it will also ascend or descend as the person goes up or down stairs. It also doesn’t tilt so that the contents on top of it don’t slide off. Finally, it moves and turns as the person pushes or pulls it, so the experience is more or less exactly like a shopping cart minus the wheels. And it can do all this by knowing if the force being exerted is being done by a human or from the weight of the objects on top of it.
This floating and hovering “cart” sounds dreamy and very useful both for shoppers as well as personnel who have to bring goods from storage to the aisle. That said, the design is far from perfect, let alone presentable and aesthetic. For one, everyone who has ever used a drone will know how noisy they can be, especially one of this size. For another, the current Palletrone is only able to carry less than 3kg of cargo, which is significantly less than a family’s typical grocery bag. It’s a start, though, and one that finally addresses one of the biggest inconveniences when going to the supermarket by boldly giving the decades-old shopping cart a do-over.
