Photo via the hitchBOT website
A talking, hitchhiking robot that's been traveling the world in the backseat of strangers' cars since 2014 is about to set out on a coast-to-coast road trip to San Francisco, AP reports.Armed with nothing other than an outstretched robot thumb and a limited vocabulary of small talk, hitchBOT—the brainchild of two Canadian researchers, Frauke Zeller and David Harris Smith—is leaving Boston today with a bucket list. It's already toured Canada and Europe, where it crashed a wedding, sat in on an Indian Reservation powwow, and spent a week with a metal band. Now it wants to do America, and with the help of some of its 34,000 Twitter followers, it shouldn't have much trouble.The robot stands about as tall as a six-year-old and is made out of a bunch of weird shit. Its body is a plastic beer bucket, its arms and legs are pool noodles, and it wears big, rubber gloves and rain boots. Zeller and Smith topped it off with an LED face stuck in a permanent grin and an AI personality, but didn't give it the ability to move on its own. Instead, hitchBOT needs fellow travelers to help it spend a night in Times Square (bad move), catch a live jazz show in New Orleans (good move), and do the wave at a sports game, along with a few other things on its checklist.hitchBot's built-in camera and GPS tracker allow it to document its trip, and the robot will tweet about its current location throughout the trek. If things go according to plan, people will cart the robot across the country in their cars, dropping it off wherever they please with its thumb stuck up in the air for the next traveler to pick up. If not, some asshole will smash it to pieces with a baseball bat, or a tornado will turn it into dust."We want to see what people do with this kind of technology when we leave it up to them," Zeller told the AP. "It's an art project in the wild—it invites people to participate."