Development of a New Talking Robot for Human-like Voices Production

摘要

The purpose of this research is to clarify a human vocal mechanism from engineering view-points by reproducing a human vocal movement with an anthropomorphic talking robot. The authors developed a new talking robot WT-2 (Waseda Talker-No.2) for the production of human-like voices. WT-2 has the lung, vocal cords, vocal cavity and nasal cavity, the total DOF is 15. The length of the vocal tract is about 175[mm] and almost same as an adult male's. Compared with WT-1 or WT-1R that had been developed until last year, WT-2 could utter Japanese vowels more clearly, and produce stops, fricatives and nasal sounds.