Hitchhiking robot tests human’s trust of bots

Somewhere in the U.S. sits a robot, that looks much like the creation of an imaginative child, depending on the trust of humans to get to its final destination in San Francisco.

HitchBOT, a combination of art, science and tech, was created lovingly by professors in Canada as an experiment to see just how much humans trust robots.

The hitchhiking bot, which consists of a plastic beer pail torso, pool noodle limbs and an acrylic cake saver for a head, sits on the side of the road via a built in tripod and depends on the goodness of humans to be picked up and make it to his goal destinations.

"It's a very important question, to say, do we trust robots?" assistant professor at Ryerson University in Ontario and co-creator of the robot, Frank Zeller explains, "In science, we sometimes flip around questions and hope to gain new insight. That's when we started to ask, 'can robots trust humans?'"

The little robot is hoping to hit U.S. highlights such as Times Square, Disney World, and the Grand Canyon before heading back to San Fran's Exploratorium.

Humans that are kind enough to pick up HitchBOT won't be lonely, though.

The waterproof robot has moving LED lights as eyes and can speak through an artificial intelligence program called Cleverspeak, which allows him sing, dance, even throwing out trivia.

"It can be quite chatty. Sometimes it's a little annoying, and it doesn't shut up, but you can tell it to be quiet," Zeller comments.

The scientists that created the bot have equipped him with GPS so they can track where he goes, and camera that snaps a photo of his surroundings every 20 minutes.

"We want to be very careful to avoid surveillance technologies with this," co-designer David Harris Smith of McMaster University states, "that's not what we're trying to do here."

HitchBot began his travel Thursday night where, after a festival at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, Smith and Zeller took him to an undisclosed road to be left to his, and whatever human may stumble across him's, devices.

"We want to see what people do with this kind of technology when we leave it up to them," Zeller adds, "It's an art project in the wild — it invites people to participate."

So on your travels, keep an eye out for a little hitchhiking robot with a "yard-sale aesthetic," and maybe you'll be the one to take him to Disney World.