According to the creators, they spent around $1000 building it. The robot caught the attention of people wherever it went with its kindness and interesting conversations.
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HitchBOT was created as part of an experiment to see if robots can trust humans and recently set off on a hitchhiking trip across the U.S where it met its untimely demise in the “City Of Brotherly Love”. Unfortunately, hitchBOT was vandalized overnight in Philadelphia; sometimes bad things happen to good robots.
On Saturday someone destroyed the robot and took all its technology guts.
Hitchbot was a hitchhiking robot who made it all the way through Canada and parts of Europe without getting so much as a dent or a scratch.
Mostly, the offers are from strangers who heard about the project on the news or were following hitchBOT’s journey through social media or its website, she added in an email.
The team behind the experiment said they are looking to understand what lessons can be learned from hitchBOT’s misfortune. The brainchild of David Smith, PhD, of McMaster University and Frauke Zeller, PhD, of Ryerson University, the simple robot housed Global Positioning System, 3G connectivity, video and audio circuitry, and power-generating solar panels encircling its body.
hitchBOT hitchhiked across Germany and the Netherlands this year following a successful tour in Canada the previous year.
The robot, which wore yellow wellies and had “San Francisco or Bust” written across its head, was the size of a small child. The family, which consists of the researchers and others associated with the project, told hitchBOT fans that it doesn’t plan to press charges against the unknown perpetrators. With its metal torso wrapped in flexible solar panels, and foam arms ready for handshaking and hugs, Hitchbot was hardly the Terminator. A Global Positioning System in the robot tracked its location, and a camera snapped photos about every 20 minutes to document its adventures. Though there were fears of hitchBOT being destroyed or kidnapped along its unaccompanied journey, its creator says that the robot reached the West Coast relatively unscathed.
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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.
