An autonomous singing and news broadcasting face robot

Abstract

This research aims to devise a robotic head with human-like face and skin that can read randomly composed musical notation, sing out the corresponding content of the song and broadcast news. The face robot is composed of an artificial facial skin that can express a number of facial expressions via motions driven by internal servo motors. Two cameras, each installed inside an eyeball of the face, provide vision capability for reading of the music notation. Computer vision techniques are subsequently used to interpret the musical notation and lyrics of the song. Voice synthesis techniques are then implemented to enable the robot to sing out the song. The mouth patterns of the face robot will automatically change to match the emotion corresponding to the lyrics of the song and broadcasting news. Experiments show that the face robot can successfully read and then sing the song a high percentage of the time.