Wearable Emoji Display for a Robot Dog to Enhance Communication and Trust

Robots’ abilities to communicate with humans are often limited, missing expressive power and non-verbal communication cues. We present a concept design and a wizard-of-Oz prototype of a wearable emoji display, which aims to provide additional communication cues to communicate the robot’s intent and provide means for a more affective communication towards a human. We explore the concept of an emoji necklace with a robot dog, which has more limitations in expressing its intent compared to a humanoid robot design. The concept was evaluated in a user study with ten participants. The salient findings indicate that the robot dog’s intentions were perceived as easier to interpret with the wearable emoji display, especially when displaying clear emojis matching the robot’s movements.