Will Cogley's Animatronic Mouth Responds to His Typing
This robotic mouth mechanism features servo linkage movements and text input.
While we mostly take it for granted, the way our mouths work to produce words is truly amazing. Naturally people have tried to imitate this look in robots, with varying levels of effort and success. Animatronic hacker Will Cogley — who previously produced this ridiculously realistic heart model — decided to try his hand at the ‘mouth game,’ producing a structure with several degrees-of-freedom, a moving tongue, and a very realistic teeth assembly.
It features a pair of MG996R servos to actuate the jaws, as servo-linkage forceps assemblies in front of the everything. Two servos each actuate linkage cheek assemblies, giving them the freedom to move up, down, in, or out as needed. The tongue is another linkage system, designed to come up and sit on the bottom teeth to form the "th" sound.
Control-wise, Cogley has implemented a system where one types in a sentence into a Python program, which breaks up the words into individual sounds. These are then sent to an Arduino board that poses the mouth to form words. He plans to explore its software interaction further, perhaps syncing it up with a live microphone, or doing motion capture. It’s an interesting device now, and who knows, might bee the start of something even more amazing to come!