Industry Perspectives on Design Feedback in Mobile Robot Development

Demand for mobile robots operating in human environments has expanded rapidly, providing a proliferation of potential feedback channels for developers. While firms increasingly rely on customer input, deployment data, and regulatory guidance to refine autonomous systems, these mechanisms also interact in ways that complicate iteration. Drawing on sixteen interviews with industry professionals developing mobile robots, we analyze how these feedback channels shape design decisions, where they introduce friction, and why they frequently conflict. These interviews revealed that the following three mechanisms are among the most valuable channels to developers: feedback from customers, feedback from quantitative data, and feedback from regulators. We find that customer practices can obstruct data collection, data-driven improvement is constrained by safety and privacy requirements, and regulatory expectations raise reliability thresholds that slow deployment. By examining these cross-channel tensions, we highlight the structural bottlenecks that developers confront when building robots for complex, real-world settings.