For the Realization of Mechanical Speech Synthesizer. Proposal of a model of tongue for articulation.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose BERO (Biomimetic Tongue Robot), which is a device to try to reproduce the motion of the tongue during speech production by mimicking the human tongue. One of the features of BERO is abundant in softness because it is composed of soft actuators which have no hard parts. This feature corresponds to the fact that the tongue has no skeleton and is an advantage in realizing the soft motion of the tongue. As a prototype of BERO, we manufactured in trial a two-dimensional model in the median sagittal plane, and we carry out reproduction of the tongue shapes with BERO. As a result, we could say that BERO is suitable to reproduce the tongue shapes.