On soft machine --toward the realization of mechanical speech synthesizer

摘要

In this paper, Soft Machine that has no hard parts is proposed. As an example of Soft Machine, a prototype of Biomimetic Tongue Robot (BERO) is made and the outline of tongue in the medium sagittal plane is reproduced by using it. BERO is a partof Mechanical Speech Synthesizer (MSS), and it is a device to be used to imitate the movement and the deformation of the human tongue during articulation by mimicking the human tongue. One of the characteristics of BERO is that it consists of not linkssystem but actuators made of silicone rubber. It corresponds to the fact that human tongue has no skeleton and consists of soft tissue.