The Death and Lives of hitchBOT: The Design and Implementation of a Hitchhiking Robot

Abstract

In the early morning hours of 1 August 2015, as it waited for its next ride on a Philly park bench, unknown assailants destroyed hitchBOT. Arms torn from its body, legs broken, gutted of its electronics, it was left discarded in a park, minus its smiley-face LED head. Around the world headlines announced the death of a much-loved robot, children and adults shed tears, haters hated on Philadelphia, cartoonists and musicians paid tribute, journalists wrote obituaries and the publicly minded rallied to support a rebuild. The authors share the story of the life and times of their creation, hitchBOT the hitchhiking robot.

Why Build a Robot With Artificial Consciousness? How to Begin? A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Design and Implementation of a Synthetic Model of Consciousness

“…to contemporary films, such as Alex Gardner's Ex-Machina (Gardner, 2014). Wherever, robot artworks have been physically created with phenomenological premises, traits associated with consciousness, such as selfawareness, intention and emotion, are simulated rather than realized, for example Robot K-456 (1964) by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe (Kac, 1997), Helpless Robot (1987 by Norman White (White, 1987), and hitchBOT (Smith and Zeller, 2017). I would propose that these works and stories about sentient robots stem from contemplation of the limits of human technological agency and the hazards of transgressing what has been "designed" by nature.…”

“…Studies have shown that simple social cues already strongly affect our views of robots. For instance, people refuse to turn off a small humanoid robot when it is begging for its life (Horstmann et al, 2018), or feel the destruction of a robotas your hitchBOT taught us-morally wrong (Smith and Zeller, 2017;Fraser et al, 2019).…”

Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children’s Healthcare Experiences

“…As AI systems such as robots grow more pervasive in daily life, understanding the impact of such systems on society has become ever more crucial. For social robots, in particular, an important consideration is determining the social role that the robot should play [23], as well as an ethical and appropriate means of making the capabilities of the robot clear. Most existing literature on ethical aspects of AI in the healthcare setting often focuses on AI diagnosis tools [21].…”

Embedded System based Bangla Intelligent Social Virtual Robot with Sentiment Analysis

“…However, that this is not a proper distance metric as it does not have the triangle inequality property. To repair the triangle inequality property while maintaining the same ordering, it is necessary to convert to angular distance [3]. Given two vectors of attributes, A and B, the cosine similarity, Cos (θ), is represented using a dot product and magnitude as In the case of information retrieval, the cosine similarity of two documents will range from 0 to 1, since the term frequencies cannot be negative.…”

“…Social robots in this case play a vital role for artificial intelligence. After the invention of the much loved hitchhiking robot named hitchBOT [3] the maker received a huge fund by crowdsourcing. When they wanted to send it out in the wild for an adventure, to their utter surprise, they observed many of the followers of the robot accompanied with it and realized how much impact one robot can make in social life [4].…”