Not Much Brotherly Love for Robot in Philadelphia

Photo via hitchBOT Facebook page.

Let’s be honest, whether fair or not, Philadelphia has a certain reputation.

It’s a city where football fans booed and threw snowballs at Santa Claus. Baseball fans once threw D cell batteries (the big ones) at visiting outfielder J.D. Drew.

And now, it’s where an adorable robot who was only counting on the kindness of strangers to hitchhike across the country was vandalized, effectively ending his summer trip.

hitchBOT’s trip came to an (Friday) night in Philadelphia after having spent a little over two weeks hitchhiking and visiting sites in Boston, Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, and New York City.

Unfortunately, hitchBOT was vandalized overnight in Philadelphia; sometimes bad things happen to good robots, according to the latest post on hitchBOT’s Facebook page.

hitchBOT is a small, Canadian robot that began his journey across the United States with a stop at the Peabody Essex Museum earlier in July before hitching his first ride in Marblehead.

Last summer, the hitchBOT hitchhiked across Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia. Additional travels took the robot to European sites such as Germany and the Netherlands.

This year, the hitchBOT plan was to head south, where it (with the help of its co-creators, Dr. David Harris Smith of McMaster University and Dr. Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University) hoped to hitchhike across the USA from Salem to San Francisco.

It took a little while for hitchBOT to get out of Massachusetts, but alas, with the vandalism incident in Philadelphia, it never made it out of the Northeast.

“We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over,” his creators stated on Facebook. “For now we will focus on the question ‘what can be learned from this?’ and explore future adventures for robots and humans.”

Further details about the hitchhiking trip and the vandalism will be available by August 5.