Development of a New Anthropomorphic Talking Robot - Investigation of the Three Dimensions Articulation Mechanism and Improvement of the Pitch Range

摘要

We developed a new three dimensional talking robot WT-6 (Waseda Talker-No.6) with 17-DOF. It has independent jaw opening/closing mechanism, which controls the relative tongue position in the vocal tract as well as the oral opening. The tongue is controlled to form the 3D shape, which is important in the consonant articulation. Such a 3D structure makes possible to produce more realistic vocal tract shape. The vocal cord model was also improved by adding new pitch control mechanism. Preliminary experimental results showed that synthesized speech quality improves for vowel /a/, /u/ and /o/.