Nuts and bolts ride across America goes off with a hitch
IT LOOKS like it was constructed from components scavenged from a jumble sale, but an extrovert robot has managed to charm its way across North America by hitching rides from strangers along the trans-Canada highway.
Travelling from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, hitchBOT has dipped its wellington boots in Lake Superior, crashed a mountain-top wedding and attended Canadian pow-wow.
It has covered almost 7000km , charging its batteries when necessary from the cigarette lighters of cars.
Described by its creators as ‘‘an outgoing and charismatic robot’’, hitchBOT is equipped with artificial intelligence, speech recognition and speech processing,
a
Native which it has used to beg for lifts.
The robot also has a sense of direction, and can ask and answer simple questions. It can tap Wikipedia to brush up on local knowledge and has a car seat attached to its torso so that helpful motorists can strap it in.
Its chat is limited, but it did not take long for hitchBOT to become a social media sensation, with 40,000 Twitter and Instagram followers. Many of the people who offered it a ride were already familiar with the bizarre contraption.
‘‘ Social and traditional media have really ensured that hitchBOT is well known,’’ David Smith, the robot’s co-creator, who teaches at McMaster University in Hamilton, said. ‘‘Some drivers have tried to search its location. And in most cases, hitchBOT offers.’’
HitchBOT was invited at one point to a pow- wow with the Wikwemikong tribe and was taken dancing on the prairies of Saskatchewan. It later hitched a ride with Belgian tourists.
It then fell in with The Wild, a rock band from British Columbia, who took it to a gig.
has had multiple
Smith said his team monitored hitchBOT via GPS and social media but the drivers who picked up the machine were in control of its fate. The official aim of the project was to ‘‘ explore topics in humanrobot-interaction and to test technologies in artificial intelligence and speech recognition and processing’’.