I decided to design a product to address the recent surge, over the last decade, in the need for efficient delivery solutions in the last-mile logistics sector. Presenting the NP-DRA, which stands for Neighborhood Parcel Delivery Robot Assistant. Its purpose is to accompany a delivery driver in rural neighborhood areas and assist by making deliveries to multiple houses while the driver completes their own deliveries. This aims to speed up the workflow process as a whole and allow delivery drivers to reach their daily targets.

One of the reasons I chose to design and present this solution stems from my passion for design engineering. I have always admired how designers are major problem solvers, finding issues in a product or workflow and finding ways to fix them. When considering what to do for this project, I decided to identify a problem I had personally experienced and develop a solution to address it. Countless times in the past, I have found myself on the receiving end of missed parcel deliveries due to drivers failing to meet their targets and workload. Therefore, I designed the NP-DRA with the intention of mitigating this issue for myself and others.

The NP-DRA serves as a semi-autonomous delivery robot. It was not created to replace delivery drivers but to partner with them. Preprogrammed with delivery destinations and preloaded by the driver, the robot travels in the back of a delivery van until it reaches neighborhoods. It then makes deliveries while communicating with and notifying recipients once it is on its way and upon arrival. Recipients verify and collect their parcels with either a QR code or One Time Passcode, while the main delivery driver monitors the process from their device to ensure no delivery complications occur (i.e. theft and tampering or robot malfunctions).