I was tasked with designing the MVP for a web-based responsive dashboard that would be the single source of truth for the orchestration of multiple robots—a manufacturer agnostic solution. Verizon Location Technology partnered with a development team within Senteca to build and demo a working prototype to the CEO of Verizon, Hans Vestberg, and the Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, Rima Qureshi.
Initially I began working as a secondary UI/UX Designer to the Lead Product Designer within Verizon Location Technology, and was ultimately reassigned as the Primary UI/UX Designer for this project. We debuted the first demo in October 2020 and recently had our second demo in May 2021.
The Autonomous Mobile Robot project stemmed from the technology and research we utilized for Super Bowl LIV. As we began to explore other use cases for Facility Managers for indoor spaces, we found a compelling use case within smart warehouses that utilized Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs).
Ultimately, Verizon Location Technology’s goal is to reduce the barriers to the AMR market related to cost. By leveraging 5G and the MEC to unload processing from the robot itself to the cloud, we introduce a solution of lowering the cost of the robots themselves to potential customers. The orchestration of robots from different providers allows potential customers to leverage the money and hardware they have already invested by utilizing their existing AMRs.
Based on user research interviews conducted from Super Bowl LIV, we assumed the following about AMR utilization in a warehouse environment:
We conducted 8 in-depth user research interviews with subject matter experts who were involved with decision making and / or purchasing of AMR solutions or the operation and monitoring of AMRs.
The Robotics Developer and Manager who wants the ability to monitor the robot system’s health and visual feeds to easily identify and proactively resolve problems with her fleet.
The Operations Manager who wants to see how the robot fleet is performing in relation to their projected targets to ensure that the robots are safely and effectively improving worker productivity.
The Senior Executive who wants to be able to monitor and optimize their business processes so they can achieve / exceed their KPIs.
In my initial sketches of the AMR dashboard, I was sure to include a tab for alerts for users like Kathy who would want to know more granular details about the fleet’s operations and health in real time. The task tab’s purpose is to service all 3 personas, as the users could drill up or down to find information that was most pertinent to their role—in order to achieve this, I included a filter option that could surface as high level or in-depth information as required by the user’s goals. The devices tab allowed the user to have a source of truth for all information pertinent to each AMR.
In my first iteration of the dashboard, I essentially translated over my sketches with Verizon branding in mind.
Based on our research, the design for the facilities tab needed to be straight forward and simple for easy onboarding, but scalable for more than one facility. I found it important, especially for first time users, to provide contextual notifications that provided system feedback to the user with next steps on how to fix any issues that may occur. I wanted to be sure that within the individual facilities page, that the map was persistent throughout,
Given more time, I would have ideally liked to include more information in the individual facility card (ex: how many AMRs were present, how many workers were present, average operations up time, etc.). Additionally, there would be an alerts and log tab present to provide more detailed information to utilize for analytics.
Considering we were having a lot of the processing of information happen on the MEC (Multi-Edge Computing System), it is assumed that the MEC was going to make the most optimal decisions for operations.
However, considering the MEC is not something the public is widely familiar with or trust, I wanted the user to have a sense of control. For example, when the user is creating a new mission for the AMRs (also known as “actors” in the robotics industry) the MEC will suggest the best actor for the job, but will allow the user to override the suggested actor with another actor that can also perform the job based on what the task is.
The design provides a wide array of information that users like Kathy, Brad and Sylvia would all find useful for their roles. The more the users drill down into the actor’s information and controls—ranging from active mission information and controls, to teleoperation.
If I had additional time, I would have liked to include a terminal tab to allow the developers to access the terminal for individual actor’s more quickly and seamlessly. This was a feature that we included in previous iterations but had to remove due to time constraints.
We went through several iterations of the create a new mission tab. Given the time frame provided before the demo and what what technically feasible, I decided to go with the following experience.
If I had additional time, I would have liked to work with the front end developer to have an experience similar to mapping applications that users are more familiar with to reduce decision time.
The map tab allows the user to map a facility utilizing lidar cameras on specific AMRs. Not only does the map tab allow users to gather data to populate a brand new map of a facility, but also offers the users the freedom to overlay that data on top of a 2D rendering of the space and manipulate the positions of both maps to align to their specifications. This gives the user a sense of control and allows the user to tailor the data specific to their space without additional, external assistance.
The robotics industry is one that is early in its infancy, but has a wide range of possibilities. If I learned anything from this design challenge, it was that there must be a lot of considerations when designing a platform for a variety of needs that each warehouse may present.
Knowing I had a limited amount of time to execute this design and had to keep development constraints in mind I prioritized with the product and development team on what features we wanted to focus on for the demo for the CEO of Verizon, Hans Vestberg, and the Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, Rima Qureshi. I noted that it was important that we showcased the intuitive design for all levels of users in addition to the scalability of the product.
If I had more time, I would have liked to explore the idea of multiple facilities and how that would interact on the first level of navigation. There were many iterations that came between the first sketches and final design you see displayed here, but I am very proud of the work that I did on this project.
Shortly after the demo of this application, Verizon’s New Business Incubation group acquired a robotics company by the name of Incubed IT—who has been developing in the robotics space for over 5 years. When they did a demonstration for the overall Verizon New Business Incubation group, I was pleased to find that there were many similarities between their information architecture, design and functionality, so much so that I was also tasked by the newly formed Robotics Business Group to do a Verizon branded translation of their designs, in which I was able to incorporate a lot of my work for AMR.
