Realization of Vowels and Consonant Sounds Using a Talking Robot (3rd Report, Development of a New Talking Robot for Human-Like Voices)

The purpose of this research is to clarify a human vocal mechanism from the engineering viewpoints by reproducing a human vocal movement with an anthropomorphic talking robot. The authors developed a new talking robot WT-2 (Waseda Talker-No. 2) that improved on WT-1R for the production of human voices. WT-2 has the lung, vocal cords, vocal cavity and nasal cavity. The total DOF is 15. The length of the vocal tract is about 175 [mm] and almost same as an adult male's. Compared with WT-1 or WT-1R those had been developed before, WT-2 could utter Japanese vowels more clearly, and produce stops, fricatives and nasal sounds using a new flexible tongue-mechanism and the decrease of the sound leak from many craps except for the lips or nostrils.