Abstract:
This is a study of lip movements when speaking
the English language, developed humanoid robot
face with moving lips and text-to-speech ability. A
humanoid robot face is a robotic face capable of
mimicking an actual human being during speech.
Humanoid robots are fnding their way into human activities rapidly with the advancement of
technology. Humanoid robots will become very
close to humans since they can produce human-like
speech by synchronized realistic lip movements while
providing sound. However, most humanoid robots
do not have very much correct lip movements at
the moment. A robotic face with more realistic
lip movements will apply in several situations such
as news reading, teaching, storytelling, interactive
robotic machines, and live advertisements. During
the development, a robotic model was built that
could simulate jaw movements. Additional lip
features were added with driver mechanisms to move
the lips in synchronization with the voice produced;
audio and text analyzing technology was utilized to
improve the accuracy based on phonetic symbols
of the English language. Movements of the tongue
are essential when reads phonetics in the English
language. In this development, physical equipment
does not generate vocals; therefore, we neglected
tongue movements and facial expressions. We only
focus on accurate synchronized lip movements using
three control points. This analysis can be used to
simulate lip movements in the model of a humanoid
robotic face. The performance was tested, and the
closeness of the robot-generated lip movements to
actual human lip movement was improved by using
many voice samples and digitized lip coordinates
with the help of image processing techniques.
