On soft machine-toward the realization of mechanical speech synthesizer

Abstract

In this paper, a soft machine that has no hard parts is proposed. As an example of a soft machine, a prototype biomimetic tongue robot (BERO) is developed and the outline of the tongue in the medium sagittal plane is reproduced. BERO is a part of a mechanical speech synthesizer (MSS), and it is a device to be used to imitate the movement and the deformation of the human tongue during articulation by mimicking the human tongue. One of the characteristics of BERO is that it consists, not of a links system, but actuators made of silicone rubber. It corresponds to the fact that the human tongue has no skeleton and consists of soft tissue.