Looks like the project is going to be a success:
After a stop to recharge, Canada‘s most famous, only beer cooler-turned-hitchhiking robot will set off on one of the final legs of its cross-country journey.
HitchBOT, the brainchild of a group of Ontario researchers, will have managed to thumb its way from Halifax to Victoria in about three weeks.
Last check on Wednesday, the chatty, social media-savvy robot was in Kelowna, B.C., on its way to the Open Space art centre on Vancouver Island before heading to the Salish First Nations community.
Came across this story today and I thought it was a pretty cool idea since I've always wanted to travel across Canada myself (gone from Ontario to the Atlantic so far).
It give some folks some perspective of how long this journey will be (from wikipedia):A hitchhiking robot is set to start off on a whirlwind adventure, attempting to hitchhike from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, and relying on the kindness of strangers to get to its final destination.
Hitchbot is more of a collaborative art project and social experiment than a marvel of modern technology.
The little traveller is about the size of a six-year-old child that was made using pool noodles, an old bucket, Wellington boots, rubber gloves, solar panels and a computerized "brain."
David Harris Smith is an assistant professor at Hamilton's McMaster University who first came up with the idea of creating a collaborative art project centred around a hitchhiking robot.
"Hitchbot is travelling across the country, and it’s collecting stories as it goes, too. So it will ask if they have a story that they’d like to tell about travelling or hitchhiking," he said.
"We would love for Hitchbot to have some adventures. Of course, I’ve hitchhiked across the country several times and for young people it used to be almost a rite of passage."Link to the article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s...nada-1.2716476Covering 9,984,670 km2 or 3,855,100 sq mi (land: 9,093,507 km2 or 3,511,023 sq mi; freshwater: 891,163 km2 or 344,080 sq mi), Canada is slightly less than three-fifths as large as Russia and slightly larger than Europe. In total area, Canada is slightly larger than both the U.S. and China; however, Canada ranks fourth in land area (i.e., total area minus the area of lakes and rivers)
So what do you guys think? Are you going to help this little fella make his journey if you were to come across him?
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A picture for those who wonder what he looks like: