Drum-mate: A Human-Humanoid Drumming Experience

We present an exploratory study investigating a drumming experience with Kaspar, a humanoid child-sized robot, and a human. In this work, our aim is not to have Kaspar just replicate the human partner's drumming, but to engage with the human in a dasiasocial mannerpsila using head gestures in a call and response turn-taking interaction and to assess the impact of non-verbal gestures on the interaction. Results from the first implementation of a human-robot interaction experiment are presented and analysed qualitatively (in terms of participants' subjective experiences) and quantitatively (concerning the drumming performance of the human-robot pair). The interaction experience is discussed in terms of imitation, turn-taking, and the effect of gender differences.