Hitchhiking robot is halfway across Canada

[Hum]

As far as hitchhikers go, this one looks harmless enough. He or she -- it's hard to tell -- is short and friendly, if a little fashion-challenged.

Get him talking, however, and he won't shut up.

Meet hitchBOT, a talking, tweeting, bucket-bodied Canadian robot that's hitchhiking west from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia -- a journey of nearly 4,000 miles. The robot employs artificial intelligence, speech recognition, social media and other tools to bum rides from motorists.

Deposited last Monday on Highway 102 outside Halifax, hitchBot by Friday had journeyed to just west of Toronto. Its travels are being documented on Twitter, on Instagram and on the robot's website, which charts its progress on a map.

The gender-neutral robot was conceived by university researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller, who view its quest as part performance art, part social experiment.

As they see it, humans in popular science fiction are always wondering whether they can trust robots. Instead, they'd like to turn the question around:

Can robots trust human beings?

So far, the answer appears to be yes. Three young men gave hitchBOT a ride, bought it a stuffed animal and fed it a "meal" of metal screws and motor oil. A couple covered hitchBOT with a plastic cape to keep it safe from the rain. And people have been recharging hitchBOT along the way by plugging it into their cars' cigarette lighters.

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