South Korea invents flying shopping cart

Are you having difficulties pushing your shopping cart downstairs, over uneven terrain or elevating it to high altitudes? Then good news, the flying shopping cart has finally been invented. The Palletrone (a portmanteau of ‘pallet’ and ‘drone’ presumably) is a drone mounted in a cage with a platform on top, that can be pushed around by a human operator in all three dimensions, developed by a team of elite flying shopping cart researchers from South Korea. The cart is controlled entirely by the handrail to be as intuitive as a non-flying cart: just push in the direction you want to go, and it goes. Even if that means going up.

There are some downsides, however. For one, the Palletrone makes more noise than just a squeaky wheel, meaning you’ll have to get used to bellowing ‘don’t forget the apples’ at volumes that will get you funny looks in the produce aisle. One bag of apples only, though, because this cart has a load limit of 2.93kg, at least at the moment. Providing the charge hasn’t run out, because it needs batteries, unlike regular shopping carts, which have wireless power delivery (formerly known as pushing). The team have expressed a desire to take the concept further though, introducing some kind of mid-flight docking system to charge the cart. This sounds very complicated just to carry a tin of pilchards up a step.

Plus, the biggest downside, imagine some poor staff member having to retrieve shopping carts out of the actual sky when the shoppers rudely refuse to return the cart to the shelter. Madness.