A team of communication researchers, based in Ontario, Canada, have launched a robot hitchhiker on July 26 whose goal is to travel across the country from Halifax to Victoria depending only on the kindness of strangers to be able to study the relationship between people and technology.

Like Us on Facebook

Since it left the team, it has been to Lake Superior, attended an Aboriginal pow-wow and crashed a wedding.

"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, according to Phys.Org, the robot appears to have been made out of items scavenged from a yard sale, such as a cake saver, bucket, garden gloves, yellow Wellington boots and a bucket. HitchBOT has a sense of direction to point it to the right direction and can even ask and answer questions. With its capability of communication, it has managed to persuade drivers to take the robot across 6,000 kilometers, or 3700 miles, since it started its quest in Nova Scotia.

HitchBOT is programmed with mobile technologies comparable to a smartphone and is equipped with a global positioning system and speech recognition software that works in synchrony with language modelling. The robot connects queries with answers by scanning for specific key words and is set to scrounge information from Wikipedia to be able to say relevant facts about the region.

HitchBOT was also programmed by the team to and to log its progress online and take photos to post on Instagram and Twitter.

The robot has even amassed a huge fanbase. Smith said that Hitchbot has 11,000 followers on Instagram, 32,000 Twitter followers and 41,000 likes on the robot's Facebook account.

TagsRobotics, communication, Speech recognition, Speech, Wikipedia