Mechanical design of a talking robot for natural vowels and consonant sounds

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.