A hitchhiking robot completed its journey across Canada over the weekend. The HitchBOT began its trip in Halifax on July 27th and ended in Victoria on Saturday. The trip was over 3,700 miles (or over 6,000 kilometers for the Canadians).
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According to reports, the hitchhiking robot did not stab a single person who gave it a ride.
Armed with just a thumb and an attractive smile, the GPS-enabled robot relied completely on friendly drivers to get it from Atlantic to Pacific. The bot talks, and apparently it's pretty persuasive. The team behind the project left HitchBOT on the side of the road near the Halifax airport.
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"It was literally less than two minutes from the time we set the 'bot on the road and the first vehicle pulled over," said co-creator David Smith, a professor at McMaster University and leader of the team.
The little smiley-faced robot saw got an adventure any long-haired, Kerouac-quoting college sophomore would be jealous of. The first car to pick up the adorable vagrant were headed for some camping in News Brunswick. From there, the bot went to a wedding and ended up at powwow. It even did the Harlem Shake (apparently, it takes a year for our trends to die before they export them north).
HitchBOT was created to explore human-robot interaction-and also because robots can't get driver licenses yet. Watch some clips of the traveling robot below.
