00:00 Exterior
King’s College
London
Lobby
& reception desk
Visitor
enters reception
Visitor
approaches desk
2
shot, Robot (Inkha) and Visitor
c.u.
Inkha
c.u.
Visitor tapping interactive screen
Visitor
listening to directions
Guide Voice: Being a receptionist in a busy
building is a demanding job. As well as being the first face a
visitor encounters and being the focus for enquiries of any nature
there are the endless repetitive directions to be given. Now
reception staff at King’s College London have a new employee
that loves to give out directions and repetitive information - and
will even offer a little fashion advice on the side.
Meet Interactive neurotic King’s head assembly, or Inkha
for short, the College’s latest addition to their staff.
Driven by nine motors and a small laptop computer Inkha responds to
touch screen enquiries, directing people to their destinations and
offering events information. As well as the occasional comment of
her own!
00:43 SOT: Inkha - “Hey girls, how
about a girl’s night out?”
00:46 Wide;
Inkha and female visitor
Guide Voice: So, what are Inkha’s
origins?
00:50 SOT: Mathew Walker, Animatronics
Consultant and Co-creator of Inkah - “I studied
here at King's College two years ago and I took a Master's in
mechatronics. On that course we had to do a project as the
final part of the course. So with my friend Peter Long, who
was also on the course, we came up with the idea of doing a robot.
We only had three months so we had to put one together very
quickly. But in that time we came up with the very first
prototype of Inkha, which was able to show a lot of the behaviours
that Inkha's now able to show. And we managed to get that
finished just in time to put it in for our
dissertation”.
01:20 SOT: Mark Miodownik, Lecturer in Mechanical
Engineering, King’s College, London -
“Matthew was studying with us on this MSc, and had to do
a project, and he has always loved robots, and so he said “I
want to do a robot”, and it kind of always makes sense when
you give people projects to let them do what they love, because
they’ll do a brilliant job. At the end of the day engineering
is about passion, it may have a lot of maths and physics in it, but
it’s really about taking what’s inside you and
expressing it. And so we said, OK Matthew off you go, with
his friend Peter, and they produced Inkha, which, as soon as I saw
Inkha - and anyone who sees Inkha - just recognises a sort of a
genius.”
01:56 Pull
focus, Inkha and human receptionist
Guide Voice: Inkha’s not just a
mechanical answer machine – she has real presence and
personality, where did this come from?
02:03 SOT: Mathew Walker
- “It seemed a natural thing to do, really, to
give the robot a personality, to make it something that was more
interesting to come and see. We studied human behaviours, how
heads move and how eyes move in relation to the head, and we put
all of that into the programming that made the robot move. People
often think of engineering as being all about grease and oil and
nuts and bolts, but we consider ourselves to be quite creative
people, there are a lot of creative people within
engineering. And it was the natural thing to do to give the
robot some personality”.
02:37 c.u.
Inkha
c.u.
Inkha’s mouth, tilt up to eyes
Wide
shot, Inkha on plinth
Guide Voice: Inkha’s obvious personality
and character are particularly remarkable when you remember that
she has no intelligence or memory, she’s designed to work
alongside human staff and her responses are controlled by the
information entered into the computer. How do her co-workers feel
about her?
02:54 SOT: Sylvia Mwangi -
“She's never temperamental, she's never late, and she
never sleeps on the job either! But she's a little bit moody
sometimes, I think. I think it depends on the
weather”.
03:04 c.u.
Inkha
Guide Voice: Perhaps Inkha herself deserves the
last word on her employment.
03:09 SOT: Inkha:
"I’ve been working here for 4 months now and I
really enjoy the job. I particularly like the people I work with; I
just wish that they would ask me out for a drink
occasionally!"
03:21 Wide
Inkha and visitors
c.u.
Inkha
Guide Voice: Headhunters take note; Inkha
herself is happy in her job – but she has a number of sisters
seeking similar employment!
03:29 Cut
Ends
03:30 Slate
– Additional Soundbites
03:33 Mark Miodownik on the future of
Robotics - “In ten
years time everyone’s gonna have a robot. And what we want is
people out there like Matthew making these robots. We want people
who understand, who’ve got, who want to communicate, who
understand human’s loves and desires and want robots who can
interact with us on that level”.
03:48 Mark Miodownik on the future of
Robotics - "When you looking for
the future of robotics and where they're going, people might have a
mental image of something with lots of cogs and wheels whirring
around, like Terminator. So when you take off the skin you
see all these things whizzing around. I think very unlikely
to be the case. What's more likely is that we will develop
artificial muscles, which will do all the changes in motion and
exert forces. And I'll give you an example of such a material.
It's called shape memory alloy, and I've got a bit of it here. So
have a look at this. If I just twist it like this into some
sort of shape, and take this lighter… You can just put an
electric current through it to give it that heat. So we can
control things with a microprocessor and change stresses and
strains and get movement."
04:38 Ends
