Design of Voice Synchronized Robotic Lips

Abstract

Humanoid robots are finding their way into human activities at a rapidly increasing rate with the advancement of technology. They have become very close to humans, and some are designed even with sentence synthesizing ability which makes it possible for the robot to formulate its own response to questions posed to them. Human-like speech is by far the most highlighted feature in a robot that makes it ‘humanoid’. In several applications such as teaching, storytelling, reading and communication aids for the blind and vocally handicapped and to pronounce text messages on mobile phones at busy times, the human-like speech techniques are used by robots to provide more realistic feedback to humans. Control of facial features, especially lip and other facial muscle movement and synchronization with speech are some of the most important aspects in making humanoid robots. A robotic mouth with the ability of mimicking human-like speech was developed with to synchronized lip movements while providing sound through a text-to-speech conversion system attached to the mouth module.