TY - GEN
T1 - Singing performance of the talking robot with newly redesigned artificial vocal cords
AU - Nhu, Thanh Vo
AU - Sawada, Hideyuki
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partly supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No. 15K01459).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/8/23
Y1 - 2017/8/23
N2 - The authors are developing a talking robot which is a mechanical vocalization system modeling the human articulatory system. The talking robot is constructed with mechanical parts that are made by referring to human vocal organs biologically and functionally. In this study, a newly redesigned artificial vocal cords is developed for the purpose of extending the speaking capability of the talking robot. The artificial vocal cords is developed using functional approach. A thin layer of rubber band with a width of 7mm is attached on a plastic body in a sealed chamber creates an artificial sound source. The fundamental frequency of the sound source vary from 80Hz to 250 Hz depending on the pressure to the rubber band and the curving shape of the rubber band. The curving shape of the rubber band is adjustable by an innovative design mechanism driven by a servo motor. The amount of air pressure applied to the rubber band is controlled by another servo motor. The experiments to verify the speak capability of the talking robot with this newly redesigned vocal cords is conducted by letting the robot generating five vowel sounds with different combinations of 20 levels of rubber band shape and 5 levels of air pressure input. The pitch of each sound is extracted to determine the effect of the rubber band shape and the pressure input on the output sound. The result shows that this newly redesigned vocal cords greatly increase the speaking capability of the talking robot, especially its singing performance.
AB - The authors are developing a talking robot which is a mechanical vocalization system modeling the human articulatory system. The talking robot is constructed with mechanical parts that are made by referring to human vocal organs biologically and functionally. In this study, a newly redesigned artificial vocal cords is developed for the purpose of extending the speaking capability of the talking robot. The artificial vocal cords is developed using functional approach. A thin layer of rubber band with a width of 7mm is attached on a plastic body in a sealed chamber creates an artificial sound source. The fundamental frequency of the sound source vary from 80Hz to 250 Hz depending on the pressure to the rubber band and the curving shape of the rubber band. The curving shape of the rubber band is adjustable by an innovative design mechanism driven by a servo motor. The amount of air pressure applied to the rubber band is controlled by another servo motor. The experiments to verify the speak capability of the talking robot with this newly redesigned vocal cords is conducted by letting the robot generating five vowel sounds with different combinations of 20 levels of rubber band shape and 5 levels of air pressure input. The pitch of each sound is extracted to determine the effect of the rubber band shape and the pressure input on the output sound. The result shows that this newly redesigned vocal cords greatly increase the speaking capability of the talking robot, especially its singing performance.
KW - Artificial vocal cord
KW - Fundamental frequency
KW - Rubber band
KW - Talking-robot
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U2 - 10.1109/ICMA.2017.8015895
DO - 10.1109/ICMA.2017.8015895
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85030327285
T3 - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, ICMA 2017
SP - 665
EP - 670
BT - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, ICMA 2017
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 14th IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, ICMA 2017
Y2 - 6 August 2017 through 9 August 2017
ER -