Robot Human Synchronization for Musical Ensemble: Progress and Challenges

Human beings are principally efficient at synchronizing and predicting within a swiftly altering realtime environment. For instance, various activities that involve harmonized movements, like catching a ball and dancing, needs firm decision making, based on partial information. However, the synchronization of tasks offers serious difficulty for the current architecture of robots. This is even more difficult in Human-robot interactions. A potential solution is to consider all entities as coupled oscillators. Then, Kuramoto's synchronous oscillator concept should then be applicable in an adaptive way. However, in real-life, uncertain sensory environments creates huge challenges. This paper reviews the progress of human robot synchronization for a musical performance. The results are presented in a quantitative manner. The paper provides a discussion of the research findings, along with an indication of the major future implications.