Development of a talking robot with vocal cords and lips having human-like biological structures

Fukui, Kotaro; Nishikawa, K.; Ikeo, Shunsuke; Shintaku, Eiji; Takada, Kotaro; Takanobu, Hideaki; Honda, Masaaki; Takanishi, A.

doi:10.1109/iros.2005.1545356

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…WT-5 also had a new vocal cord mechanism that mimics the human biomechanical structure. And its voice was more human-like compared to those of previous robots [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot having a Three-dimensional Articulation Mechanism and Improved Pitch Range

Fukui

Ishikawa

Sawa

et al. 2007

Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

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We have developed a new three-dimensional talking robot Waseda Talker No. 6 (WT-6), which generates speech sounds by mechanically simulating articulatory motions as well as aero-acoustic phenomena in the vocal tract. WT-6 has 17-DOF vocal mechanism. It has three-dimensional lips, tongue, jaw and velum which form the 3D vocal tract structure. It also has an independent jaw opening/closing mechanism, which controls the relative tongue position in the vocal tract as well as the oral opening. The previous robot in the series had a 2D tongue and was not able to realize precise closure to produce human-like consonants such as /s/ or /r/. The new tongue, which can be controlled to form 3D shapes, is able to produce more realistic vocal tract shapes. The vocal cord model was also improved by adding a new pitch control mechanism that pushes from the side of the vocal cords. The pitch range is broader than that of the previous robot; it is sufficiently broad so as to be able to reproduce normal human speech. Preliminary experimental results showed improved synthesized speech quality for the vowels /a/, /u/ and /o/.

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“…WT-5 also had a new vocal cord mechanism that mimics the human biomechanical structure. And its voice was more human-like compared to those of previous robots [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot having a Three-dimensional Articulation Mechanism and Improved Pitch Range

Fukui

Ishikawa

Sawa

et al. 2007

Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

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“…11 In 2005, WT-5 was developed with vocal cords and lips based on human biological structures. 12 At Kagawa University, a mechanical model of a human vocal tract system based on mechatronic technology has been developed. 13,14 It implements a neural network based mapping between motor positions and the produced vocal sound obtained by an auditory feedback in the learning phase.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Articulatory Control of Talking Heads in Humanoid Robotics Using a Genetic-Fuzzy Imitation Learning Algorithm

Mumolo

Nolich

2007

Int. J. Human. Robot.

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In human heads there is a strong structural linkage between the vocal tract and facial behavior during speech. For a robotic talking head to have human-like behavior, this linkage should be emulated. One way to do that is to estimate the articulatory features from a given utterance and to use them to control a talking head. In this paper, we describe an algorithm to estimate the articulatory features from a spoken sentence using a novel computational model of human vocalization. Our model uses a set of fuzzy rules and genetic optimization. That is, the places of articulation are considered as fuzzy sets whose degrees of membership are the values of the articulatory features. The fuzzy rules represent the relationships between places of articulation and speech acoustic parameters, and the genetic algorithm estimates the degrees of membership of the places of articulation according to an optimization criteria and it performs imitation learning. We verify our model by performing audio-visual subjective tests of animated talking heads showing that the algorithm is able to produce correct results. In particular, subjective listening tests of artificially generated sentences from the articulatory description resulted in an average phonetic accuracy slightly under 80%. Through the analysis of large amounts of natural speech, the algorithm can be used to learn the places of articulation of all phonemes of a given speaker. The estimated places of articulation are then used to control talking heads in humanoid robotics

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“…[5], [6]) is one approach to directly attack the problem of imitation between dissimilar bodies. Using such a vocal robot, Yoshikawa et al [7] proposed a mother-infant interaction model for infant vowel acquisition based on observations in developmental psychology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding the Correspondence of Caregiver's Vowel Categories Based on Unconscious Anchoring in Maternal Imitation

Miura

Yoshikawa²,

Asada

2007

RO-MAN 2007 - The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication

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Abstract-Due to differences in body structure between robots and humans, it is a formidable task for robots to show behaviors that correspond to human behaviors. As a simple case of this correspondence problem, this paper presents a robot that learns to vocalize vowels through interaction with its caregiver. Inspired by the findings in developmental psychology, we focus on the role of maternal imitation (i.e., imitation of a robot voice by a caregiver), which could play a role in guiding the correspondence of sounds. Furthermore, we suppose that it causes unconscious anchoring in which the imitated voice by the caregiver is approaching to one of his/her own vowels without his/her intension, and thereby works for guiding robot's utterances to be more vowel-like. We propose a method for vowel learning with an imitative caregiver under the assumption that the robot knows the desired categories of caregiver's vowels and the rough estimate of mapping between the region of sounds that the caregiver can generate and the region that the robot can generate. Through experiments with a Japanese imitative caregiver, we show that a robot succeeds in acquiring more vowel-like utterances than would be possible without such a caregiver, even when the robot is provided different mapping functions.

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Development of a talking robot with vocal cords and lips having human-like biological structures

Cited by 15 publications

References 4 publications

New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot having a Three-dimensional Articulation Mechanism and Improved Pitch Range

New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot having a Three-dimensional Articulation Mechanism and Improved Pitch Range

Towards Articulatory Control of Talking Heads in Humanoid Robotics Using a Genetic-Fuzzy Imitation Learning Algorithm

Finding the Correspondence of Caregiver's Vowel Categories Based on Unconscious Anchoring in Maternal Imitation

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