{"id":42,"date":"2022-03-29T10:45:03","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T10:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atswins.ai\/blog\/how-many-engineers-does-it-take-to-make-a-robot-sing-daniel-carrillo-starship-technologies\/"},"modified":"2022-03-29T10:45:03","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T10:45:03","slug":"how-many-engineers-does-it-take-to-make-a-robot-sing-daniel-carrillo-starship-technologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atswins.ai\/blog\/how-many-engineers-does-it-take-to-make-a-robot-sing-daniel-carrillo-starship-technologies\/","title":{"rendered":"How many engineers does it take to make a robot sing? | | Daniel Carrillo | | Starship Technologies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By March 2022, Starship robots have played over 108,000 songs in the last seven months. This means that customers who ordered from Starship added about 500 songs to their baskets every day. Considering this was not possible until recently, this is a great result. how did you achieve this?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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People order songs and add them to baskets along with milk and bread like regular groceries. The items are then collected and loaded onto the Starship robot. When the robot arrives at the customer and the customer opens the lid, the robot will start playing the selected song. What a nice and pleasant surprise! However, this was not always the case.<\/p>\n

Seven months ago, all our robot said was “Hello!” Or “Bon Appetit!” No one could have imagined that the robot would perform over 100,000 songs in the next six months.<\/p>\n

Misha Stepanov, Starship’s senior backend developer, recalls that when she joined the company in the spring of 2021, the robot could only dance. \u201cFor that, we enlisted the help of a choreographer who helped us synchronize multiple robots and move them around. They danced beautifully and were fun to watch,\u201d says Misha. He comments and admits that this inspired him to create something new and unique.<\/p>\n

To that end, Misha began testing his ideas with Starship’s Senior Product Design Engineer, Anti Veeranna. Because of that, Anti knew everything, was involved in many initiatives, and was happy to jump around with all the crazy ideas.<\/p>\n

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In the COVID pandemic, people were already accustomed to self-isolating and working and studying from home. At the same time, this new situation increased stress levels.<\/p>\n

On the positive side, we’ve received feedback that Starship’s robots and deliveries tend to cheer people up during this difficult time. The idea was catchy and exciting. If something like that can make someone’s day a little brighter, it’s worth the effort and time to think of ways to boost it further. We are now focused solely on taking the to another level.<\/p>\n

They wondered if they could make the Starship robot play “Happy Birthday” when it’s a customer’s birthday, for example. \u201cWe knew that if we could pull this off and make it happen, other scenarios wouldn’t be too difficult, so we focused on that implementation,\u201d Misha explained.<\/p>\n

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So the first idea was to redevelop Starship’s current mobile application to allow users to select songs as a separate add-on rather than just ordering a shopping cart. However, creating this solution seemed to take too long to develop, take too long to release, and required input from separate teams and coordination between various departments.<\/p>\n

Anti then suggested what if the song could be added to the basket as a regular product. This means that no interface development is required, including additional programming and lengthy coordination processes. Sounds perfect and it just got a whole lot easier!<\/p>\n

The only development work required seemed to be:<\/p>\n