HitchBOT's tour of Germany
HitchBOT, the hitch-hiking robot from Canada, recently spent ten days travelling around Germany – visiting Neuschwanstein Castle, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg.
Where does a guest from Canada go if he's in Munich for the first time? To the Hofbräuhaus, of course! And this also applies to the humanoid HitchBOT – especially since the little chap's torso is made of a beer barrel. So there he sits with a two-litre stein of beer in his rubber-gloved hands and a friendly smile on his face. That's what's so special about the robot: he's really friendly and communicative. He even learned German for his trip to Germany, and the tourists at Neuschwanstein Castle loved it. HitchBOT always knows where he is, and he can impress the people he chats to with his knowledge of the local attractions. The only thing he can't do is travel on his own; that's why he needs to hitch a lift. In Germany he travelled from south to north, east to west. The robot was really enthusiastic about the Shrove Monday carnival parade in Cologne: "What a great idea. The people in Germany celebrate carnival to drive away the winter," he commented on Facebook. He excelled in television shows, chatted at receptions in the capital Berlin, and made lots of new friends.
German co-inventor
HitchBOT is an art project at the interface between art, artificial intelligence, speech recognition and communication between people and robots. The person behind it is the German linguist Frauke Zeller, who lives in Canada. She qualified as a professor at the Technical University of Ilmenau, Thuringia, and has been lecturing at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, since 2013. She created HitchBOT together with her colleague David Harris Smith of McMaster University, Hamilton, and a group of students. The scientists' aim with this research project is to study how people deal with a friendly machine. HitchBOT had already hitch-hiked through Canada in the summer of 2014 – and the response was enthusiastic. Frauke Zeller: "We wanted to see whether and how people get involved with robots, when they have a choice. I mean they could also simply leave HitchBOT standing at the side of the road and not help." In Germany, he enjoyed a friendly welcome and was given lifts in a sports car and on a postman's bicycle. And in Frankfurt- am-Main he was even invited to a wedding and kissed by the bride.
HitchBOT on Social Media Week in Hamburg from 23 to 27 February 2015.
