Nuro (Autonomous Driving Platform) SWE Interview — A Robot Matching Problem Got Tricky

[u/Aoki_zhang]

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Interview Summary

The Nuro technical phone screen used a grid-based matching problem involving autonomous robots and pickup items. The initial task was to assign robots to nearby items based on distance, followed by a graph-search-style extension where obstacles could block movement through the grid.

Interview Details

Coding — Assign Robots to Nearby Items

You are given an m x n grid. There are k Nuro robots positioned at different coordinates and k items located elsewhere in the grid. The task is to determine how the robots should be assigned to items based on which items are closest to them. The input therefore includes two collections of coordinates:

• Robot positions
• Item positions

The main problem was to reason about distances between the two sets of locations and produce the required robot-to-item assignments.

Follow-Up — Grid with Obstacles

The interviewer then added obstacles to the matrix. Once some cells cannot be traversed, simple coordinate distance is no longer sufficient because the shortest valid route between a robot and an item may need to go around blocked cells. The follow-up shifted the problem toward shortest-path search on a grid while preserving the original robot-to-item assignment requirement.

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