Modeling and analysis of elastic tongue mechanism of talking robot for acoustic simulation

This paper describes the modeling and analysis of an elastic tongue mechanism of a talking robot WT-3 (Waseda Talker-No. 3) and the development of an acoustic simulator for the construction of the computational model of human speech production. WT-3 consists of lungs, vocal cords and articulators. Because they were composed of an elastic rubber to make various shapes and to seal the air and sound, it was difficult to estimate and analyze the mechanisms. Therefore, we constructed a modeling method to simulate the shape of the elastic mechanisms using rigid links. This method is applicable to all the elastic body. We developed an acoustic simulator for WT-3 based on this method.