A Hitchhiking Robot made out of a bucket is already halfway across Canada

Does a robot with wanderlust seem improbable? Check out hitchBOT, a robot created by researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller that is literally hitchhiking across Canada, dependent on nothing more than Canadian kindness to go from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia.

CNN points out that since the robot was deposited street-side at the end of July, it has already traversed roughly halfway across Canada. It ’s been tweeting and Instagramming the whole time as hosts take the genderneutral robot on adventures that slowly advance it across the continent. It’s visited places that vary from the Quebec tourism centre to Wikwemikong.

The sci-fi paradigm is largely unchanged since researchers began to ponder if we can “trust” robots in the future. The hitchBOT experiment flips this concept around — can robots trust humans to help them catch a ride somewhere? If current progress is any indicator, it seems to be a resounding yes.