Toronto - It has dipped its boots in Lake Superior, crashed a wedding, and attended an Aboriginal powwow. A talking, bucket-bodied robot has enthralled Canadians since it departed from Halifax last month on a hitchhiking journey to the Pacific coast.
HitchBOT, created by a team of Ontario-based communication researchers studying the relationship between people and technology, will reach its final destination Sunday in Victoria, British Columbia, where it will receive a traditional aboriginal canoe greeting at Victoria Harbour.
“What we wanted to do is situate robotics and artificial technologies into unlikely scenarios and push the limits of what it’s capable of,” said David Smith, the robot’s co-creator, who teaches at Ontario’s McMaster University. “It’s challenging but it can also be highly engaging and entertaining, as hitchBOT has proven.”
The robot looks like it was made out of components scavenged from a yard sale — a bucket, pool noodles, cake saver, garden gloves, and yellow Wellington boots — but it has a sense of direction and can even ask and answer questions. Its conversation skills might be a bit stilted, but hitchBOT has managed to charm its way across 3 700 miles (6 000 kilometres) since it began its journey in Nova Scotia on July 26.
Smith said hitchBOT has a built-in GPS system and is programmed with mobile technology similar to a smartphone, with speech recognition software that works in conjunction with language modelling. The robot links questions with answers by looking for certain keywords and is programmed to scour Wikipedia to spit out regionally relevant facts.
The team also programmed hitchBOT to track its adventures online and to take pictures to post on Twitter and Instagram.
It didn’t take long for HitchBOT to become a social media sensation and, truth be told, many of the people who have offered it a ride already knew about it before encountering the bizarre contraption.
Smith said its Instagram following was approaching 11 000 people, its Facebook account had garnered more than 41 000 “likes,” and it has nearly 32 000 Twitter followers. - Sapa-AP