Zoox

With no driver in the car, the vehicle itself has to tell riders what's going on: this one is yours, the doors are opening, we're about to leave. On the Rider Experience team at Zoox, I worked on how the robotaxi communicates with passengers, from finding it on the street to stepping out at the destination.

I built a multimodal sensing and feedback system that let the design team iterate on these behaviors in real time. Custom embedded hardware tied into the vehicle's networks to orchestrate light and sound, and a unified animation pipeline with remote tools let designers tune interaction parameters directly on the vehicle instead of waiting on engineering cycles. That cut the loop from concept to on-vehicle validation and carried features directly into production.

Proximity was the hard part. Inside a vehicle, sensor noise is constant, so I led the filtering and triangulation work and prototyped dedicated wireless networks to estimate a rider's position precisely. That work informed a broader strategy for wayfinding using a direct wireless interface, and early research on how riders locate and approach the vehicle was later reflected in Find My Zoox.

The prototypes became a standard platform for the research team's quantitative studies on passenger trust and ergonomics, and part of the UX validation pipeline that tested rider experience before vehicles reached production.