Robonomics in the 6G Era: Playing the Trust Game With On-Chaining Oracles and Persuasive Robots

6G is anticipated to become more human-centered than 5G and should not only explore more spectrum at high-frequency bands but, more importantly, converge driving technological trends such as blockchain technologies and connected robotics. This paper focuses on the emerging field of robonomics, which studies the sociotechnical impact of blockchain technologies on social human-robot interaction and behavioral economics for the social integration of robots into human society. Advanced blockchain technologies such as oracles enable the on-chaining of blockchain-external off-chain information stemming from human users. In doing so, they leverage on human intelligence rather than machine learning only. In this paper, we investigate the widely studied trust game of behavioral economics in a blockchain context, paying close attention to the importance of developing efficient cooperation and coordination technologies. After identifying open research challenges of blockchain-enabled implementations of the trust game, we first develop a smart contract that replaces the experimenter in the middle between trustor and trustee and demonstrate experimentally that a social efficiency of up to 100% can be achieved by using deposits to enhance both trust and trustworthiness. We then present an on-chaining oracle architecture for a networked $N$ -player trust game that involves a third type of human agents called observers, who track the players’ investment and reciprocity. The presence of third-party reward and penalty decisions helps raise the average normalized reciprocity above 80%, even without requiring any deposit. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that mixed logical-affective persuasive strategies for social robots improve the trustees’ trustworthiness and reciprocity significantly.