Robot traversed unharmed through Canada, Germany, Netherlands.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The hitchhiking robot from Canada that made headlines for successfully travelling across Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands failed in its effort to traverse the United States when it was destroyed in Philadelphia just a few weeks into its proposed trans-American journey.
The team received an image of the destroyed robot Saturday, but do not know who vandalized it, the Associated Press reported. The robot’s battery is dead and the team cannot locate it.
“Sometimes bad things happen to good robots,” the Canadian research team that created “hitchBOT” said in a statement.
It started out in the U.S. on July 17 and saw sites in Boston and New York City before meeting its untimely demise in the city of brotherly love.
“We have no interest in pressing charges or finding the people who vandalized hitchBOT; we wish to remember the good times, and we encourage hitchBOT’s friends and fans to do the same,” hitchBOT’s creators said in a Facebook post. They also said the project had reached its end, at least for now.
When the robot was operational, a GPS in the robot tracked its location, and a camera randomly snaps photos about every 20 minutes to document its travels. The hitchhiking robot has amassed quite the following, with more than 30,000 people following it on Twitter.
The researchers who created hitchBot have been using the data gleaned from the bot’s travels to study how people interact with a robot that needs their help, unlike traditional robots designed to help them.
“We want to see what people do with this kind of technology when we leave it up to them,” Frauke Zeller, one of the creators, previously stated. “It’s an art project in the wild — it invites people to participate.”