About:

• This Projects Focus Was On The "Starship" Delivery Robots And What They Could Do

  Starships are cute little food delivery robots that roam around delivering food to hungry college students and residents. This project looks at other things that Starships may be able to do. To do this our group first needed to learn about ways we could go beyond the current method of single deliveries to improve their utility and how we could use startships to foster more human-to-human connections.

A Little Reading:

• First Thing We Did As A Group Was Some Background Research
• "Autonomous Delivery Robots May Be Both Friend and Foe to Gig Work Delivery Drivers"

  This article looked a the future of food delivery robots and where things are going. The interviewed person belives that delivery robots wont replace drivers but will make their job easier. This says to me that there are people on board with delivery robots and it points out a lot of good things about using delivery robots. Namely Instead of a driver needing to use a lot of gas and a mutiple thousand pound car to deliver food, a small delivery robot can do it.

Learning More:

• Before We Make Changes To Starships We Need To Know More About Them And How They Are Used So We Can Figgure How They Might Be Improved

  Jumping headfirst into this arguably the most important part of this project is learning about how the starships are used and in what ways they might be improved. There are many different ways that this can be approached but since Starship's main purpose is to make life easier for those who use it looking at how people use Starships and their experiences with them is probably a good place to start. One very powerful tool to gather information for this is interveiws and thats what we are going to look at first.

Interveiw:

  To ensure we got answers to our questions that could be compared from one group member to another we settled on the following standard questions. Major, age & gender, what the interviewee does in their free time, what is something that you want that is inconveniently far, have you ever used a Starship, have you had any issues with Starships, what would you like to change about how Starships operate, and if there was anything else they had to say about Starships.

• As A Group We Noted Down Three Main Points

  a. Speed - students are on a tight schedule and they don’t want to wait for a robot to come over.

  b. Sidewalk Space - the robots make unpredictable movements so pedestrians, bikers, skateboarders have issues not running into them.

  c. Vandalism - users have witnessed others purposefully stepping in the way, picking them up, taking them apart

Data Analysis:

  We now as a group had quite a lot of data from background research as well as from interveiws that needed to be organized and processed. We did this in a few diffrent ways. First was model diagramming. This is what that looked like.

Storyboard:

• Our Next Step Was To Storyboard What We Thought A Solution To The Mentioned Issues Might Be
• This Is What We Came Up With:

Final Design:

• This All Comes Together In Our Final Design

  Our final design was what we believed would improve the Starship experience. We believe that by changing from the model of single deliveries to a system that works like a mobile vending machine would improve the way that Starship works and make it a better experience based on what we learned. From a vendor perspective no longer do you need to constantly restock the robots for single deliveries instead the robot can be filled once and make trips around campus delivering food. From an endpoint users perspective there are also multiple improvements. First, by using a mobile vending machine approach we can ensure that getting food is easy and quick. The modified app shows the location and what's in stock and getting a delivery is as easy as stepping outside and walking a short distance to the nearest robot. The mobility aspect means that the robots can move to the best location with high foot traffic to be as convenient as possible as well as making the robots more predictable and solving the issue of having to navigate around tons of unpredictable robots taking up valuable sidewalk space. The larger size also allows for more cameras and sensors as well as being physically larger making vandalism more difficult.

My Experience:

  During this project, my favorite part was seeing how everything came together. I was able to see how through research, interviews, and different techniques such as model diagrams and sketching resolved into an idea and how parts of design come together to make a product and improve a design. Also, something that I now appreciate even more is how important feedback is and being able to integrate it into plans and designs. Overall I learned a lot about interviewing, gathering data, organizing data, and turning what I learned from research into a final design incorporating what I learned.