Development of a New Human-like Talking Robot for Human Vocal Mimicry

Fukui, Kotaro; Nishikawa, K.; Kuwae, Toshiharu; Takanobu, Hideaki; Mochida, Takemi; Honda, Masaaki; Takanishi, A.

doi:10.1109/robot.2005.1570317

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The idea to produce artificial sounds with physical means that replicate the human vocal tract dates back to the 18th century [5]. This stream of research has been constantly active till very recently: the series of Waseda talkers [6] have human-like organs: lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, teeth, nasal cavity and soft palate casted in silicone and rubber. At Sheffield University, Hofe et al developed Anton [7] consisting of movable tongue and jaw models actuated by servo motors.…”

Section: Animatronic Talking Headsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An articulated talking face for the iCub

Parmiggiani

Randazzo

Maggiali

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

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Recent developments in human-robot interaction show how the ability to communicate with people in a natural way is of great importance for artificial agents. The implementation of facial expressions has been found to significantly increase the interaction capabilities of humanoid robots. For speech, displaying a correct articulation with sound is mandatory to avoid audiovisual illusions like the McGurk effect (leading to comprehension errors) as well as to enhance the intelligibility in noise. This work describes the design, construction and testing of an animatronic talking face developed for the iCub robot. This talking head has an articulated jaw and four independent lip movements actuated by five motors. It is covered by a specially designed elastic tissue cover whose hemlines at the lips are attached to the motors via connecting linkages.

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Section: Animatronic Talking Headsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An articulated talking face for the iCub

Parmiggiani

Randazzo

Maggiali

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

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“…There have been several attempts to build mechanical models of the vocal tract [21] [18]. While these can produce some human like sounds they are still rather limited and there are no commercially available mechanical solutions.…”

Section: Speech Production Unitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Language Acquisition Based on Motor Learning and Interaction

Hörnstein¹,

Gustavsson

Santos-Victor³

et al. 2010

Studies in Computational Intelligence

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“…There has been several attempts to build mechanical models of the vocal tract [5] [6]. While these can produce some human like sounds they are still pretty limited and there are no commercially [7] where the vocal tract is considered to be a number of concatenated tubes with variable diameter.…”

Section: A Speech Production Unitmentioning

confidence: 99%

A unified approach to speech production and recognition based on articulatory motor representations

Hörnstein¹,

Santos-Victor²

2007

2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

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Abstract-We present a unified approach for speech production and recognition based on articulatory motor representations. The approach is inspired by the Motor theory and the discovery of Mirror neurons, and use motor representations for both reproduction and recognition of speech. A model of the vocal tract is used to create sound and the created sound is then mapped back to the motor representation using a neural network. To learn the map we mimic the behavior of a child that uses a combination of babbling and interaction with its caregiver to learn how to speak. Several different phases of babbling and interaction are identified and described. These help to overcome the inversion problem. The approach has been implemented on a humanoid robot, which has successfully learned to pronounce Swedish and Portuguese vowels. We have also studied how the different phases of babbling and interaction effect the error of the map and the achieved recognition rate when presented with vowels from different subjects. Finally we compare the recognition rates obtained using motor space with recognition rates obtained by directly using the acoustic parameters.

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Development of a New Human-like Talking Robot for Human Vocal Mimicry

Cited by 14 publications

References 9 publications

An articulated talking face for the iCub

An articulated talking face for the iCub

Multimodal Language Acquisition Based on Motor Learning and Interaction

A unified approach to speech production and recognition based on articulatory motor representations

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