The robot was designed to be a talking travel companion and could toss out factoids and hold limited conversation.
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Oh dear, my body was damaged, but I live on with all my friends.
The Canadian researchers who created hitchBOT as a social experiment about whether robots could trust humans said that someone in Philadelphia vandalised the robot early Saturday, putting a sudden and premature end to its first American tour.
The creators of HitchBOT promised to fix the robot in order to complete its roundtrip hitchhiking quest back to San Francisco.
However, the group said that more is in store for the little robot, which got to sit in the cockpit of an Air Canada plane, visit Dutch art galleries and meet Santa Claus. They only plan to learn from the situation and explore future robot-human adventures.
In a statement, the Canada-based makers of the machine said that they do not have interest in filing charges or finding the people who were responsible for vandalizing hitchBOT.
The note went on to assure fans that the hitchBOT experiment would not end here, but for now, the project’s creators will focus on what can be learned from the vandalized robot.
During a recent stint of Europe, hitchBOT attended a Comic Con event, a wedding, spent a week with a heavy metal band… and even had its portrait painted. The robot was immobile on its own and it depended entirely on strangers to pick it up and pass it on to other travelers, says Zeller.
HitchBOT has a feature that makes it automatically take a photo every 20 minutes, the goal of which is to document its travels.
The hitchBOT – a robot from Port Credit, Ontario is a creation of Dr David Smith from the McMaster University, and Dr Frauke Zeller from the Ryerson University.
A picture of a decapitated HitchBOT lying on a dirty street was posted on Twitter over the weekend.
Started by “geek with a passion” Nick Green, the crowdfunding page aims to raise $1,200 to rebuild HitchBOT and presumably restore its faith in humankind.
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“We can see on all our data that the tablet and battery and everything shut off at the same time so it must have been when they vandalized the bot”, Zeller said.
