hitchBOT, the tweeting, hitchhiking robot has completed its 6,000km journey across Canada; courtesy of friendly travellers and helped along a little by the sun.
We first mentioned hitchBot back in June, before the robot’s final design was unveiled.
hitchBOT’s body consists of a garbage bin hat, a plastic beer bucket, pool noodles for arms and legs, gumboots, rubber kitchen gloves and a plastic cake saver. It has a retractable tripod to keep it in an upright position and a car seat attached to its torso so hitchBOT could be safely strapped into a car.
While its general construction may be “hardware-store chic”; it also features more advanced technology. hitchBOT has 3G and GPS capabilities and a face made from LED lights, which displays expressions. The robot is able to talk, tweet and take photos. Given it was patched in to Wikipedia; it seems it could get a little too talkative at times – but it least it recognised commands such as “be quiet”.
hitchBOT’s body is coated in solar panels to help power it and also features a car cigarette lighter adapter. So not only did hitchBOT bum rides across Canada, but power too. Unable to move, hitchBOT relied entirely on the kindness and curiosity of those travelling the Trans-Canada highway.
hitchBOT commenced its journey on July 27th; so it’s taken under a month to hitchhike from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia.
The GPS and 3G wireless connection recorded its location throughout the journey on a map on www.hitchBOT.me. The little robot certainly attracted a lot of attention. At the time of writing, hitchBOT had 47,000 fans on Facebook, 34,700 followers on Twitter and more than 12,000 on Instagram.
hitchBOT was first conceived in 2013 as a collaborative art project between Dr. David Harris Smith, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, and Dr. Frauke Zeller, Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University.
The idea took off and the team grew, with the project evolving into the exploration of human-robot interaction and as a test-bed for artificial intelligence and speech recognition and processing.
