"Postmates' quest to build the delivery robot of the future"

Wired:

To Kashani, that represented a real problem. Here they were, trying to build a rover that would bring people joy, pick up their iced tea, deliver their late-night burritos, pipe tunes throughout the sidewalk—but what did that matter if people still associated it with doom, or wanted to kick it, or tried to dismember it, or push it into the street?

"There's this perception issue, this dystopian view," Kashani says. "We have five seconds to change people's minds.”

So Kashani developed a new objective: The rover had to work, yes, and successfully navigate its way into restaurants without running anyone over. But it also needed to make people happy. The next prototype, Valentina—named for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly to space—looked like a Fisher-Price play truck. The team added googley eyes, and lips. Painted it in bright colors, found more cute music to play. Then someone sketched up Serve, more like a child-sized shopping cart, and they knew they had it right.

Creating an anthropomorphic robot is a design gamble. Give the bot a face and people expect it to behave like a person, which can annoy people when it doesn't. Plus, Serve has a sort of ice cream truck effect. Lehmann says kids always want to run up and play with it.