Hitchhiking robot co-creators might decide to rebuild
TORONTO — Collapsed among trash and dead leaves, its arms ripped off and its skull and brain nowhere in sight, the talking and tweeting hitchhiking robot from Canada met its untimely end in Philadelphia over the weekend.
But there may be another chance at life for the child-sized traveling robot.
HitchBOT’s co-creators Frauke Zeller and David Smith said Monday they’ve been overwhelmed with support and offers to revive the robot since it was vandalized beyond repair and left on a street in Philadelphia on Saturday and they are considering rebuilding it.
The robot was on a hitchhiking, social experiment adventure in the U.S. after trekking across Canada and parts of Europe without incident last year. Strangers helped the immobile hitchBOT travel from place to place while checking items off its bucket list.
The solar panel-powered robot was designed to traverse continents on the kindness of strangers and could toss out factoids and carry on limited conversation. It was equipped with a GPS tracker and a camera to chronicle its journey and was programmed to snap a photo of what was going on around it every 20 minutes.
The child-sized droid started its U.S. journey in Massachusetts on July 17, its rubber-gloved thumb raised skyward, a strip of tape across its body reading “San Francisco or bust!”
During its short-lived U.S. trip, the hitchBOT attended a Red Sox game and took a ride on the New York City subway.
