“My love for humans will never fade,” wrote hitchBOT on August 5, four days after its travels through the United States were cut short.
hitchBOT was exactly what the name suggests, a hitchhiking robot from Port Credit, Ontario. It was a humanoid, gender-neutral robot built by Dr. David Smith and Dr. Frauke Zeller. The Doctors’ goal was to perform a social experiment, seeing how long it would take the robot to hitchhike from Halifax, Novia Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia. Essentially the experiment was meant to determine how long it would take hitchoBOT to get from one side of Canada to the other relying solely on the kindness of strangers.
hitchBOT wasn’t able to move on its own, but was able to carry on simple conversations with people; it could answer basic questions and recite facts. It was meant to be a robotic traveling companion to people driving across the country, equipped with a GPS, 3G connectivity, and a camera. With these tools the researchers were able to track its location and periodically take pictures of what hitchBOT was seeing. They even attached a wish list of sights it wanted to see along the way. hitchBOT has Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as its own hashtag, which allowed the kind people who picked it up to share pictures of where they met hitchBOT and what they saw together.
In 2014 it traveled across the expanse of Canada (over 3,700 miles) in less than a month. Less than a year later it traveled to Germany and the Netherlands and hitchhiked around for a few days. In July of this year, hitchBOT came to the United States, starting its journey in Boston with the goal to reach San Francisco. Sadly, and also a bit ironically, hitchBOT met its end in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, on August 1 when it was vandalized beyond the point of reconstruction.
hitchBOT holds no grudges though, stating, “Learning about people and culture has been an amazing experience.” The Internet was in an outcry over the demise of hitchBOT at the beginning of August, with many people re-Tweeting photos they had taken with the robot and expressing their condolences. This isn’t the end of hitchBOT though, the creators have plans to create a new robot; however its creators also have other robotic projects in the works, like kulturBOT, who travels around to different art galleries, taking pictures and sharing its experiences.
If you would like to learn more about where hitchBOT went and what it saw, check out its website at m.hitchbot.me.
– Leah Harrower, JETPUBS Inc.