Dynamic control of lip-configuration of a mouth robot for Japanese vowels

Abstract When an improvement in communication between human and an intelligent machine-like computer and robot is considered, it is natural that coordination between facial expression as a nonverbal modality and voice as a verbal one may create more human-like communicative interaction. We have developed dynamic control of lip-configuration of a mouth robot which can generate the motion of lips of the mouth robot for Japanese vowels “a”, “i”, “u”, “e”, and “o”. This paper describes briefly: (1) features of human lip-configuration when he/she pronounces Japanese vowels, (2) determination of position of man-made muscles needed to form the mouth shape, (3) dynamic performance of small pneumatic actuator, and (4) experiment of mouth shape generation for five Japanese vowels. We examine the static and dynamic characteristics of lip-configuration on the mouth robot for five Japanese vowels and show satisfactory results.