“If we get the OK from the creators to fix or replace the needed parts for hitchBOT, we’ll be happy to do so”, it said on its blog. One day, it took in a Red Sox game, checking off one of the items on the bucket list created for it. But hitchBOT never made it off the East Coast.
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Hitchbot, which last year successfully travelled 3,700 miles across Canada over three weeks with the help of human kindness, was destroyed recently in Philadelphia while attempting to repeat its feat in the US.
The robot’s US road trip started in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on July 17 with its thumb raised skyward, a grin on its digital face and tape wrapped around its cylindrical head that read “San Francisco or bust”.
The robot’s creators, led by Frauke Zeller of Toronto’s Ryerson University and David Harris Smith of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, were sent a picture of the mutilated robot on 1 August but were unable to track its location because the battery was dead.
The immobile but communicative robot, which had to rely on humans to lift it into their cars and unload it at places where it could be spotted by other drivers, was vandalised beyond fix in Philadelphia. “I guess sometimes bad things happen to good robots!” it tweeted on Saturday.
The video has fuelled more online outrage over the demise of hitchBOT, but others are questioning the authenticity and provenance of the video, given that the man who supplied it also runs a YouTube prank show.
It was fitted with a camera to take a photograph of its adventure every 20 minutes – and could even engage in limited conversation with its travel companions, offering random factoids to keep them entertained.
The team said they “have no interest in pressing charges or finding the people who vandalized hitchBOT”.
With the robot destroyed, Zeller said, she was most concerned about children who loved hitchBOT and followed it on social media.
“And, you know, we would say at this point, mostly”. I hope the perpetrators are found and punished. And then they come and ask, and what is this, you know?
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For now, the researchers are focusing on what they can learn from this experience.
