## 5 Discussion
### Exploring the Design of Pepita  
The first part of the evaluation consisted of a general evaluation of different characteristics of the design of Pepita. Regarding the huggable aspect, we compared Pepita with three other huggable robots (Table 1). Among them, Probo [29] was designed with a caricatured appearance, The Huggable [9] looks like a teddy bear, and The Hug [57] has a simple appearance with big arms and no facial features. We could see that, even though Pepita has no arms, it had a score similar to the other three interfaces. However, the teddy bear appearance effectively evoked the feeling of being huggable, which was reflected in higher scores. Evaluating huggable aspects using only photos can lead to limited results since the impression can change when directly touching the robot. Because the role of the appearance was being investigated, we found appropriated to use photos to compare the proposed design with other huggable robots. In this study, we concluded that common features in huggable interfaces (e.g., open arms) are not essential, but making the robot look familiar based on an already existing idea of huggability could be beneficial to make the robot more appealing to be hugged. Then, methods for conveying the robot's affective expressions were evaluated. We compared robots that used mechanical facial expressions (Probo [31] and Zeno [32]) and two robots that used a display to manage the robot's facial expressions (Pepita [58] and Buddy [11]). The results showed that there was a significant difference between Pepita and the other three robots. Participants favored both of the robots that presented expressions using a display over the two that used mechanical facial expressions. However, [PERSON]'s expressions were significantly more acceptable than Pepita's expressions. Embedded displays (Buddy) can be used to present facial expressions as a part of the robot's body, while projected displays open the possibility of designing new ways of interacting with robots. Moreover, projected images can be shared by different users and have a strong visual impact. On the other hand, robots with mechanical facial expressions have specific applications in which it is necessary to make robots that imitate a human's behavior to a higher degree. In this study, we found that, regardless of the application, using avatars projected from the robot's body was considered to be as acceptable as other more traditional ways of conveying a robot's affective expressions. Regarding the perception of the robot's appearance, the results in Figure 6 show that, in general, the participants gave [PERSON] positive ratings in the following four aspects: \"kind\", \"friendly\", \"pleasant\", and \"nice\". On the other hand, a tendency toward the attributes \"artificial\", \"machine-like\", and \"fake\" reflected that participants perceived [PERSON] as an artificial agent. These results encourage us to use a similar design in a future study given that rating [PERSON] as an artificial character is not necessarily undesirable. Based on these results, we concluded that it is important to design this type of character to have a robot-like means of expression that matches the expectations of the user. Moreover, to obtain more insights related to which factors positively and negatively impacted the perception of [PERSON], we asked the participants an open-ended question. Their positive comments expressed a general acceptance of the images projected from the robot as an alternative means of representing the robot's expressions. We observed that the huggable aspect was mentioned by some participants to be positive, but not as strong as other features. This outcome becomes more evident after reading some of the negative comments that pointed out that the robot did not look huggable enough. For this reason, we plan to work on the robot's softness to try to reduce this negative aspect. Another critical factor that needs to be improved in this design is the negative influence of the eyes.