Building the AV pizza delivery experience.
For Ford’s joint venture autonomous vehicle pilot with Domino’s conducted publicly in Miami in late 2018, I led the development of the system architecture and technology plan for a new prototype vehicle. This build was specifically designed for understanding the positives and negatives of a thoroughly simulated autonomous pizza delivery experience for all users: pizza purchasers, store employees, and the developers at Ford and Domino’s working to create the services that make it all work.
This project was a significant advancement from Ford’s previous AV pilot initiatives. It focused on integrating and refining various technological elements in the vehicle to more accurately represent the future experience, and to test the viability of an interconnected backend: a functional digital connection from the pizza purchase interface on Domino’s website, all the way through to the vehicle driver’s fleet telematics tablet and the user interfaces on the sides of the vehicle.
For the prototype vehicle, this meant direct connections to Ford’s GoRide cloud fleet system through a REST API, setting it apart from Ford’s previous AV pilots. This was just one part of the architecture I had to plan - the vehicle needed its own network and internet access to make the API accessible, but also to support our UX prototyping team’s socket communication protocol.
The socket communication protocol enabled interoperation between the vehicle’s many devices: a tablet inside the vehicle logging data, a phone with controls for the driver, a Raspberry Pi connected to the vehicle’s CAN bus to enable opening the trunk from the network, and two interface tablets on the vehicle exterior (one for each side).
Photo of the interface tablet of the passenger side of the vehicle. In this picture you can see one of the three cameras on the vehicle and an unused backup speaker.
Image by Greg Rogers.
I did the development work for the tablet and phone in the vehicle - an interface implemented in Unity and a C# program - and since I had defined the whole architecture and messaging paradigm, it was easy for a couple of my teammates to pitch in to do the initial development work for the other components.
Past AV user research projects had struggled to meet their UX research goals due to difficult data management. Getting a clear view of the interactions with the vehicle’s exterior interfaces, and reliably getting footage from cameras attached to the vehicle, was difficult with finicky GoPros that required an additional in-vehicle technician, which introduced additional operational issues and cost for these projects.
To ameliorate these issues, I integrated IP camera systems to autonomously retain footage, eliminating the need for on-site research footage management and allowing researches to watch user interactions live. With the interior tablet networked with the exterior interfaces, the vehicle was also equipped to log all the interaction data and uploading it, eliminating the need for UX researchers to decipher interactions after the fact.
We had a supplier for managing the physical build of this vehicle. Though the whole project, I frequently stopped by to ensure the technology integration progressed well and troubleshoot and issues with wiring, positioning, and the like. Working closely with the supplier team resulted in all the major issues with power and wiring getting ironed out before the vehicle was in Miami, and a fantastic build quality, with an excellent exterior audio system using panel exciters!
The vehicle successfully ran in the field for UX research a few months, with only a couple minor hiccups over that whole time, fixed easily with some power cycling. Overall, both the Ford and Domino’s teams were very happy with the build and the research insights it helped unlock.
While the vehicle was in operation, Ford featured it in a publicity event for its AV development it titled “The Miami Experience”, which stirred up a fair amount of media coverage. This fortunately has helped me recover a record of the experience of getting a pizza out of the vehicle (my original demo footage was lost), which I’ve compiled in the video above.
Bonus:
An embarrassing photo of me while I was at the Miami Experience AV publicity event, supporting this and other AV pilot prototype vehicles.