Mimicry of human speech sounds using an anthropomorphic talking robot by auditory feedback

This paper describes an autonomous control method of an anthropomorphic talking robot WT-4 (Waseda Talker No.4) to mimic continuous human speech sounds by auditory feedback. WT-4 consisted of 1-DOF lungs, 4-DOF vocal cords and articulators (the 7-DOF tongue, 5-DOF lips, 1-DOF teeth, nasal cavity and 1-DOF soft palate), and could reproduce human-like articulatory motion; the total DOF was 19. In this method, the trajectory of each robot parameter was controlled so that the acoustic parameters (pitch, sound power, formant frequencies that are resonant frequencies of the vocal tract and have the peak of the output spectrum, and the timing of the switch between voiced and voiceless sounds) generated from the robot were close to those of human speech sounds. The trajectory of each robot parameter was optimized by inputting the acoustic parameters. This method will help to clarify the human speech mechanism and to create a new speech production system.