Mimicry Control of a Talking Robot by Auditory Feedback

摘要

This paper describes a control method of a talking robot WT-4 (Waseda Talker No.4) to mimic continuous human speech sounds by auditory feedback. WT-4 consisted of lungs, vocal cords and articulators (the tongue, lips, teeth, nasal cavity and soft palate), and could reproduce human-like articulatory motion; the total DOF was 19. In this method, the trajectory of each robot parameter was controlled so that the acoustic parameters generated from the robot were close to those of human speech sounds. This method will help to clarify the human speech mechanism and to create a new speech production system.