hitchBOT

hitchBOT was designed to be a free-spirited robot who wants to explore the world and meet new friends along the way. This usually worked out splendidly, only sometimes bad things happen to good robots. During the summer of 2014, hitchBOT hitchhiked across Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia. In just 26 days it hitched a total of 19 rides and travelled over 10,000 kilometres. hitchBOT’s adventure continued in 2015 as it visited Germany to explore cities like Munich, Cologne, Berlin, and Hamburg. hitchBOT also took a vacation in the Netherlands.

Here hitchBOT introduces itself to the world.

hitchBOT was created as a social experiment and to be welcoming to humans, enabling it to represent a convincing hitchhiker. Through motion sensors, a speaker and a microphone, it is able to detect motion, listen, and even speak. Ms Zeller said: “We believe that through this artwork, we can learn a lot in terms of social robotics and how we approach robots in non-restricted, non-observed environments.” (The Independent).

In July 2015, hitchBOT was excited to announce it was going to travel the US. Soon thereafter, on August 5, CNN reported that hitchBOT was found beheaded in Philadelphia.

As Popper states, a good hypothesis should be falsifiable by experiment, so this unfortunate event was a great success for the hitchBot team from a scientific perspective.

A short academic paper was published in the Leonardo Journal.