This trip won’t go off without a hitch
'It’s like a message in a bottle,' said co-creator David Harris Smith. 'You create something as a communication to an unknown person, set it adrift, and hope for the best. There’s a pleasure in that kind of proxy communication. It has an element of the accidental about it, which is also intriguing.'
Traffic on the Autobahn may slow a bit next month when hitchBOT and its human parents arrive in Germany to test how drivers there respond to the chatty, robotic hitchhiker’s quest for free rides and conversation.
Riding a crest of popularity and success from hitchBOT’s successful hitchhiking tour across Canada, McMaster’s David Harris Smith and his collaborator from Ryerson University, Frauke Zeller — both of them communications professors — are taking their creation over the ocean. They appeared Tuesday on City TV’s Breakfast Television to talk about the trip.
They and their team have created a fresh version of hitchBOT and programmed it to speak German and to understand where it is in Germany.
The robot is deliberately designed so that it can’t move on its own, making it completely reliant on people to pick it up and move it from place to place. Seeing what happens is the main idea of the hybrid social experiment and art project.
Lager Lecture: “Can Robots Trust Humans? The Story of hitchBOT, Canada’s Hitchhiking Robot.” Thursday, March 12 at 2 p.m.
“It’s like a message in a bottle,” said Harris Smith. “You create something as a communication to an unknown person, set it adrift, and hope for the best. There’s a pleasure in that kind of proxy communication. It has an element of the accidental about it, which is also intriguing.”
The creators plan to set it on the road in Munich on Feb. 13, and hope to have it back again 10 days later, after it completes a circuit of stops to be set out in a series of challenges by the German science show, Galileo. hitchBOT is expected to post to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter along the way.
The robot hitchhiker’s mapping feature has been enhanced for the journey, allowing online followers to track its progress across Germany in greater detail.
hitchBOT Goes to Germany from hitchBOT on Vimeo.
