DocumentCode :
1747538
Title :
Mechanical design of a talking robot for natural vowels and consonant sounds
Author :
Nishikawa, Kazufumi ; Asama, Kciuichirou ; Hayashi, Kouki ; Takanobu, Hideaki ; Takanishi, Atsuo
Author_Institution :
Humanoid Robotics Inst., Waseda Univ., Tokyo, Japan
Volume :
3
fYear :
2001
fDate :
2001
Firstpage :
2424
Abstract :
Vocal movement is not only a movement of the vocal organs, it is also a movement that produces acoustic signals received by hearing as linguistic information through hydroacoustic phenomena along with the formation of the vocal way. The purpose of this research is to study the human vocal mechanism from the engineering point of view by simulating the vocal movement with a robot, and to create the dynamic model. The authors developed an anthropomorphic talking robot WT-1 (Waseda Talker-No.1) in 1999. It simulates human vocal movement, and has articulators (a 6-DOF tongue, 4-DOF lips, 1-DOF teeth, a nasal cavity and 1-DOF soft palate) and vocal organs (1-DOF lungs and 1-DOF vocal cords); the total DOF of the robot is 14. We experimented with it on Japanese vowels. However, the voice produced was not natural. In this paper we describe an improvement of the mechanisms for the realization of natural vowels and consonant sounds.
Keywords :
robots; speech synthesis; Japanese vowels; Waseda Talker 1; articulator; consonant sounds; humanoid robot; nasal cavity; natural vowels; speech production; talking robot; vocal organs; voice production; Acoustical engineering; Anthropomorphism; Frequency; Human voice; Humanoid robots; Lips; Lungs; Speech; Teeth; Tongue;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation, 2001. Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on
ISSN :
1050-4729
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-6576-3
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/ROBOT.2001.932985
Filename :
932985
Link To Document :
بازگشت