During my time working at Nuro, I worked on an 8-person team to prepare the company’s first bot to make its debut, which wound up becoming the first unmanned road-going robot on US public roads. One of the things that took place shortly after introducing our bot to the world was user testing, in which local volunteers were surveyed by a researcher during their experience interacting with the bot during a mock grocery delivery. This is what first got me thinking about robot HMI and User Experience.

The goal for this project was to put myself in the customer’s shoes and think about what would make me want to use a robot like this one. The sounds were provided to Nuro to aid in the design process for their next generation bot, and unfortunately never made their way onto their first bot during my time there.

The audio

The sounds the bot made had to be right. To high-brow technophiles, sure, interacting with one of these things for the first, second, hundredth time would be exciting and intuitive, but it’s unreasonable to expect this from most users. I set myself three main criteria:

• All overall sound design needed to have an aesthetic that was congruent with the playful and futuristic features that the exterior design of the bot possesses.

• The sounds all needed to be harmonious with each other.

• Everything needs to sound good on whatever industrial speaker would wind up being used in a production model robot.

What I wound up with are two sets of sounds, each of which I think possesses different aesthetics that could work with the visual design language of the bot. The first is a bit more playful, using higher pitch, shorter tones, and an ascending major fifth for positive feedback. The second set is more dry, using more neutral sounding intervals, but still in a major key. Everything is kept very mid-range heavy to accomodate a wide range of speakers.

All of the sounds were created using a Korg MS-20 analog synthesizer.

The visuals

[ this site isn’t done yet. be patient pls ]