LONDON – With Canadian Federal elections drawing to an end, the Liberal Party of Canada has retired their Michael Ignatieff statue and returned the unit to Madame Tussauds wax museum in London.
The unit, product name IGNAT 2.0, which served as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada since 2009, was sealed inside a wooden casket yesterday and flown to the Madame Tussauds London branch where it will remain in storage until further notice. Museum engineers will spend a few days debriefing the automaton to gather data for future models.
Despite its mediocre reception with the Canadian public, Liberal party members said they were not disappointed with the interactive statue overall.
“We got some good mileage out of it,” said Liberal MP Omar Al-Ghabra of the Erindale riding. “And, to be honest, it succeeded a lot more than we’d hoped. We’ll definitely consider Tussauds’ museums for future Liberal leaders.”
Madame Tussauds, a famous world-wide collection of wax sculptures, originally constructed Ignatieff in partnership with Honda Robotics, the same developers behind the ASIMO robot. The Liberal Party of Canada commissioned the IGNAT 2.0 after realizing that since Jean Chretien left, most Liberal leaders have been robots anyway.
The Ignatieff project marks the first time Tussauds and Honda have partnered to create a realistic figure which can interact with humans, run as the leader of a major political party, and climb stairs.
Tussauds provided the unit with basic robotics and audio-animatronics technology, while Honda engineers gave the IGNAT unit the ability to shake hands and evade difficult questions on the fly.
“We gained some really valuable field knowledge by seeing the IGNAT 2.0 in action,” said Shigeyuki Hojo, a programmer who spent months designing Ignatieff’s baby-holding protocol. “The robot is still in its beta stage, but it performed beyond our expectations.”
During active duty, the Ignatieff statue ran in two elections and completed several nation-wide tours. The manufacturers are currently analyzing the data to unearth information for future models.
“We’ve found many areas to improve on,” Hojo said. “Like a more convincing and likeable personality simulator. Also, although the IGNAT unit performed well on stairs, escalators still caused it to stumble on occasion.”
Artisans from Tussauds also noted that the figure’s exterior shell needed improvement.
“The statue wasn’t ready for full duty yet,” added Yuri Boychuk, the lead sculptor responsible for Michael Ignatieff’s facial features. “I’ve looked at the wax we used. It definitively started to show some serious wear. At the end of the run, we had to keep it in the same eerie smiling position because the wax was starting to crack.”
Continued Boychuk: “We also went a bit overboard with the eyebrows.”
Although the robot failed to secure the position of Prime Minister, members of the IGNAT team still feel that the unit could be useful for basic tasks such as that of professor, librarian, or scarecrow.
“The unit’s still got a few good years left,” said one engineer. “The skin’s already started to crack, but I estimate it can last another 18 months before the underlying cybernetics become really visible.”
As of press time, the IGNAT unit had been causing problems at the Tussauds London branch, where museum staff are reporting the figure continues to break out of its storage crate.
“We tried to keep him in our basement facility,” said Tussauds Museum security guard Bill Keeps. “But he keeps coming upstairs to greet visitors and distribute pamphlets. That’s all he knows how to do it seems. Anyway, we can’t fix it until we receive a software upgrade.”
Added Keeps: “At least our Gilles Duceppe statue doesn’t bother us. It just sits there.”
