Ultra smart hands-free suitcase would pair with your phone, follow you around

When I was in Rome, I had a solid mile-long walk from the Metro stop to my apartment. My flight landed at stupid o'clock in the morning, so I was carrying a supersized coffee while simultaneously pulling my suitcase and navigating the cafe tables that filled the sidewalks. About every two minutes, I had to put either the cup or my suitcase down so I could push a metal chair out of the way. "Why can't this be easier?" I thought to myself.

NUA Robotics thinks it should be easier too, and its solution is a suitcase that would pair with your phone and then follow you wherever you walk. The Jerusalem-based startup is testing a prototype of what could be the smartest smart luggage out there. The as-yet-unnamed suitcase — which sort of looks like a car battery with wheels — would recognize its owner and could be controlled through a Bluetooth connection and a downloadable app. When you're ready to go, you'd just press the "Follow Me" button on your phone and the suitcase would do that very thing, cheerily rolling behind you like BB-8.

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"We believe that our things should become our personal assistants, helping us with everyday tasks while communicating with us and the environment," NUA says on its blog. The suitcase would meet those criteria, sharing its location and weight with a connected smartphone and using sensors and proximity detection to avoid anything in its way (like, say, a cafe table). It also has an anti-theft alarm that would alert if someone tried to make off with it while you walked ahead of it.

And that might be the one limitation right now: the fact that you would be either walking way in front of it or slowing to a crawl to keep up with it. In a video for Mashable, NUA CEO Alex Libman said:

"At the moment, it's kind of slow-medium speed. We will decide later for safety reasons how fast it should go. But we can make it go as fast as we want."

Or maybe a customizable speed is the way to go. It could be cranked up higher for impatient travelers or for walks on smooth, obstacle-free surfaces and kept at a slower speed for disabled or elderly travelers who wouldn't want to sprint after their bag. Libman told Mashable that the company hopes that the suitcase will be on the market in the next year. So we'll just have to keep stumbling along on our own until then.