抄録
This paper describes a mechanical talking robot that resembles human speech production aparatus and its control mechanism. The talking robot, Waseda Talker, has mechanical replicas of the vocal folds, tongue, jaw and lips, and it is capable of producing vowel and consonant sounds in a human-mimetic manner. The source sounds are produced by airflow from the lungs to the glottis, and the resonance characteristics of the vocal tract are controlled by changing geometries of the articulators. Each component organ in the talking robot has many degrees of freedom and requires a high-level control design to realize continuous speech. A new control method based on articulatory motion data obtained from electromagnetic articulography (EMA) is presented together with experimental results from continuous speech synthesis using the most recent model of the robot.
