Overview
Starship robots are a staple on Purdue University’s campus. They’re in charge of delivering food from retail restaurants to students all over campus.
How could we repurpose these robots?
Overall Goals:
- Redesign Starship robots to increase Purdue University’s human-to-human connection between students.
- To make Purdue University's campus safer for students late at night.
My Role: Project Manager
It was crucial to guide my team toward success through:
- Creating deadlines
- Issuing out reminders
- encouraging them to take initiative at times
- Discussion leading
- Creating & managing documents
Personal Goals:
- Ideate aesthetic design changes to Starship Robots.
- create a quality final storyboard and investigate UI design solutions since I am interested in the artistic and design aspects of UX.
Other Project Contributions:
- affinity diagramming
- creating/designing the final presentation
- Documentation Champion
- Researching and summarizing articles
- Interview protocol + interviews
- Journey mapping
- Sketching + Ideating
- Drawing a final storyboard
- Worked on final presentation slides
Team:
- 5 Members
- Everyone had great input in all aspects of the process and I’m proud of our final work! They were a great team!
The Process
To approach this project, we started by researching the current state of Food Delivery Robots through interviews and literary reviews. This was done to understand how these robots worked and how they interacted with students at Purdue.
Findings from Literary Reviews:
- Some robots can be overridden by an operator and driven out of a situation.
- starships use machine learning algorithms to assess their environments and travel paths to become more efficient/safer.
- Starships have sensors, cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles.
- The need for customizing robots to suit specific environments and tasks was evident.
- Delivery robots are more designed for cities and suburbs, rolling along the sidewalks.
Findings from Interviews:
- The most common issues were:
- Wait time complaints.
- Inconsistent deliverable quality.
- All but one pain points identified were due to the Starships themselves or the retailer.
- The high-cost pain point can be interpreted as a personal user issue.
Initial Sketching & Ideation
Stemming from a simple idea thrown into the discussion by a team member, we settled on repurposing Starships as a safety companion on campus after ruling out other possible solutions.
It sounded great… except that it didn’t address the main goal of increasing student connection.
To address this new problem, I suggested we make the safety companion a facilitator for group walks at night.