Will you be willing to give lift to a robot on road? This is how robots are being used to find out if robots can trust humans. Dr. Dacid Harris Smith and Dr. Frauke Zeller who have come up with the idea, have announced that their hitchBOT will be carrying out its coast-coast journey across Canada on July 27th.
HitchBOT will be equipped with 3G and Wi-Fi and shall be equipped with artificial intelligence along with speech recognition. It will also utilize information from Wikipedia and social media in order to facilitate the process of hitching a ride. The journey is bound to start from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and shall cease at Vancouver.
The idea, as you might have already grasped, is not about advancing robotics but to see if robots can trust human beings instead of questioning if humans can trust robots. The picture that has been included is a picture of the hitchBOT with some photo-shopping skills being shown off; the red rain boots and rubber gloves in particular. This is what Dr. Smith and Dr. Zeller would want the hitchBOT to look like when it tries out the real world next month.
According to Dr. Zellar, while describing how hitchBOT should look like said; ‘Somebody has cobbled together odds and ends to make the robot, such as pool noodles, bucket, cake saver, garden gloves, Wellies, and so forth.’ We, however, do believe that ASIMO by Honda is a far better competitor if you want to see who can hitch a ride.
However, thumbs up to the team behind this idea and let’s see how well does the hitchBOT performs next month.
