Robotic delivery services can provide contactless delivery, a highly sought-after service under mandates of social distancing since the coronavirus pandemic has arisen. With the rise of autonomous delivery robots, humans' and robots' collaborative existence has become a crucial topic to be discussed. This graduation project aimed to explore the autonomous delivery robots' specific perception of the world through various factors: their purpose, intent, state, mood, personality, attention, responsiveness, intelligence, and capabilities, and through this understanding, design unique robot emotions that will foster them to communicate their unique needs. Since autonomous delivery robots have different concerns than people, they require different emotions. A speculative design approach has been utilised for this project. Speculative design serves two distinct purposes: it enables us to think about the future and critique current practice. It is based on imagination, imagining other worlds and alternatives, creating provocations, and raising questions, innovations, and explorations.

Throughout this project, several exploratory research methods were conducted to understand the delivery robots' worldview. Following, four unique robot emotions have been created. These emotions aim to serve particular concerns of the delivery robots on sidewalks. The proposed four unique emotions are called Donsul, Trittity, Loniformi and Puffalope. An online survey was conducted to examine whether people could distinguish these unique robot emotions from human emotions. The survey results show that people assumed that the robot is more likely to experience emotion when it experiences an adverse event, such as a barrier to executing its task. The project's value is not what it achieves or does but what it is and how it makes people feel, especially if it encourages people to question everydayness in an imaginative, troubling, and thoughtful way and how things could be different.

The project aims at designing an engaging art experience outside the Van Gogh Museum (VGM) for young people. The experience should achieve the design goal of triggering young people’s interest in Van Gogh and his art through experiencing the connections between his personal stories and his painting style and technique in a mixed-reality environment. Before defining this design goal, research was conducted through literature review, context and user research (Contextmapping), and existing XR products analysis. Through literature review, the factors of relevance and participation of enhancing engagement and their relation to emotional connection are found. It provides a clear objective for user research in the VGM context - figuring out the desired content of the museum for young people and how they would like to interact with the content. Specific qualities of interaction and desired content are figured out based on the needs of young people. Among all through mixed reality technology, mixed reality is selected due to its potential to enable diverse interaction and be more accessible by the target group. Based on insights gained from the research phase, the design goal and design criteria are formulated, validated, and prioritized based on the results of a questionnaire. In the ideation phase, ideas are generated and prototyped from both technological and context perspectives, which lead to three important results: Feasible design elements by MR, the understanding of the essential aspects of MR, and a structure of four phases of interaction that help build the design elements into a complete journey. A converging concept is created, tested, and discussed with participants and clients with all the insights above. The insights result in a content structure, providing a logical way of organizing content during the experience through layered information with a coherent storyline. It reduces the cognitive effort needed to process the information so that it engages young people more. Based on the structure of four phases of interaction and user test insights, the final concept is created. The interactive prototype is built with Java, a programming language. The prototype is used for the final concept evaluation. The concept is then evaluated and validated by both the field test and the control test, using observation, questionnaire, and interview combined to evaluate to what extend the design achieved the design goal and criteria. Limitations and recommendations for improvements are discussed at the end of the evaluation chapter. Overall, the design is an interactive art experience (installation) that brings the content of VGM to the public environment, approaches young people, and triggers their interest in the connection between Van Gogh’s stories and art with Mixed reality.

Last mile delivery is often seen as bottleneck for delivery service growth: it is the most costly and highest polluting segment of the delivery supply chain. By integrating delivery robots in society, last mile delivery can be automatize to create a more cost and time efficient and sustainable delivery service. This also applies to the grocery delivery service. However, no grocery delivery robot, that can operate on the sidewalk, is designed yet. How should such a grocery delivery robot look like? And how do we want the delivery robot to interact with the user?
This thesis provides an embodiment design for a grocery delivery robot, with the focus on the human-robot interaction at the doorstep. A desired human-robot interaction can be achieved by creating functional, ergonomic, intuitive, functionally looking, trustworthy, aesthetically pleasing and environmentally friendly design that will empower the customer to feel in control of the delivery process. To realize a functioning delivery robot, a prototype and design has been created according to a form follows function approach. A prototype of the embodiment design has been integrated with the Husky platform at the AMS Institute in Amsterdam to test and validate the human-robot interaction.
The design enables, a cool, temperature-controlled delivery with user-friendly hand-over. The user-friendly hand-over is envisioned by an automatic vertical crate hand-over movement, which mimics the current almost effortless interaction of retrieving crates from a grocery delivery service. This hand-over will to not only make the experience of retrieving groceries more joyful and ergonomic, but it will also enable a better future integration with entire delivery process. Last mile delivery will only be more efficient, sustainable, and able to offer customers more control of the delivery process, if the delivery robots are integrated within the entire delivery process.

The way an autonomous delivery vehicle behaves during an encounter with a pedestrian evokes an experience comprised of many short-term emotions, influences which behaviour that person will use in reaction to the robot. In many cases, for both the negative and positive experiences, behaviour emerges that results in time-consuming encounters. This time could be used for deliveries but in order to have a neutral interaction a behavioural change is required. Prior work by Desmet has mapped these ‘micro-emotions’ and described how they can be used to drive product design and shape product experience. As the sensing capacities and intelligence of our artefacts are increasing new opportunities arise. Could these micro-emotions also be used to shape the experience while a product is in use? We conducted a case study on an encounter between pedestrians and a small delivery robot. A clustering, based on people’s initial micro-emotions and experience, seemed to effectively capture how they would subsequently respond to the robot. We were able to design robot behaviour from these ‘emotion-clusters’ that helps to shape people’s response and experience according to achieve a time-efficient/neutral encounter. This concept opens up the exciting new design space of products that actively respond to micro-emotions.