If you pick up a robot on the side of the road this summer that can recite Victoria’s sister cities, you’ll know you’ve met hitchBOT.
The hitchhiking robot — equipped to make regionally relevant conversation using a combination of GPS and Wikipedia — will attempt to cross the country from Halifax to Victoria this summer.
Open Space, an artist-run exhibition and performance centre in downtown Victoria, is its final destination.
“Hopefully, it will have some side trips and adventures along the way. We’re very much open, if people want to take hitchBOT home to meet the family or to the coffee shop or maybe to a folk festival,” said David Harris Smith, assistant professor of communication studies and multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
“To us, that would be the best-case scenario, because it is a storytelling and story-gathering robot.”
HitchBOT’s design is minimal: Look for a bucket body, pool-noodle arms, rubber hands and wellies. Apart from its hitchhiking arm, it can’t move by itself. But it’s light enough to pick up and easy to strap into a car seat.
“Simply put, I am a free-spirited robot who wants to explore Canada and meet new friends along the way,” hitchBOT says on its website (hitchbot.me).
Harris Smith described it as “nerdy” and not unlike a know-it-all dinner guest.
The robot has been programmed to politely ask drivers to plug it into a cigarette lighter for charging. It’s also equipped with solar panels.
It will ask drivers to drop it off at coffee shops, gas stations and stretches of road where it is safe to pull over.
Harris Smith first conceived of hitchBOT with Frauke Zeller, an assistant professor at Ryerson University in Toronto with a PhD in the linguistics of human-robot interaction, as an art project. They developed it with researchers who have backgrounds ranging from engineering to speech recognition.
“It’s really out there as a piece of participatory art work; it’s a bit of cultural theatre,” Harris Smith said.
The journey begins July 27 from Halifax. HitchBOT will post to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram along the way (@hitchbot).
Ideally, no one will hog hitchBOT, vandalize it or destroy it, Harris Smith said. Developers are prepared to build a new one, if need be.
It’s unknown when it will arrive in Victoria, but expect a party.
“We should know when it’s getting close, so hopefully myself and Dr. Zeller will be at Open Space to greet it,” he said.
“Once we know it’s there … we can have a public event where we review the trials, tribulations and successes of the project.”
