New anthropomorphic talking robot having a three-dimensional articulation mechanism and improved pitch range

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/.