Development of a New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot - Design and fabrication of new vocal cord mechanism for generating various sounds

摘要

We developed a new 19-DOF talking robot WT-7 (Waseda Talker No.7) having a vocal cords model which generates glottal sound source. The artificial vocal cords formed by thermoplastic rubber, reproduce the vibration pattern similar to the human vocal cords. It has pitch control mechanism to adjust the vocal cords tension effectively more than the previous one, and has the glottal opening-closing mechanism for switching voiced-unvoiced sounds. The experimental results showed that the vocal cords model could control the pitch frequency and the spectral slope of the glottal sound source which are important acoustic features in generating various speech sound qualities.