 The robot made of pool noodles, a plastic beer bucket and Wellington boots that travel across Canada. Hop in, it's time to meet Hitchbot on this edition of Science Alive. I'm with Tom Everett, he's a curator of communications at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, so Tom, what's sitting in the back seat? Well, that's Hitchbot. And why was it built? So Hitchbot was designed as a kind of part art project, part social experiment to see if robots could trust humans. Right, and what's it made out of? So Hitchbot's made out of plastic, white, it's actually I believe a beer cooler. Kind of what you would use to make home brew, I think. Yeah, something like that. And yeah, pool noodles for arms and legs, the trademark Wellington boots. Yeah, and it's powered by a tablet computer that connects to the internet. And wasn't Hitchbot destroyed? Yeah, well Hitchbot was destroyed, but not this Hitchbot. So this is the original Canadian Hitchbot that hitchhiked across Canada in 2014. Successfully, and after the trip, they retired Hitchbot, and another one was built that hitchhiked Germany successfully and then was destroyed in Philadelphia. And why was it created to begin with? Well, the idea was to see if they built a robot with some artificial intelligence that knew some social etiquette and could be entertaining and fun, and whether it could convince regular people to take it across Canada and take it where it wanted to go. And it was a success. So if you saw it sitting by the side of the road and you picked up Hitchbot, you could chat with it? Yeah, absolutely. So Hitchbot's always connected to the internet and has artificial intelligence software. So it had certain questions that it would anticipate that you would ask, but it also could answer unanticipated questions using some online software. And it also would play games with you, had jokes to tell, things to sort of break the ice. Where did they drop it off and how far did it get? So Hitchbot was originally dropped off in Halifax, Nova Scotia in July 2014, and it made it all the way across Canada to Victoria, British Columbia. So people would just pick it up and take it as far as they wanted, put it back at the side of the road. It's been on canoe trips, it's been on ferry rides, it's been to weddings, it's hung out with rock stars, Olympians, a whole bunch of things. And why did the Museum of Science and Technology want it? Well, for us, Hitchbot's got this great Canadian story developed at Canadian universities by Canadian researchers. But it also has this great Canadian road trip story attached to it. It involved, it wasn't just a lab experiment. Hitchbot was placed at the side of the road and people just decided to take part, pick it up. So it's got this great story, but it also speaks to a very specific historical moment. I think the idea of human-computer interaction and this sort of bizarre hitchhiking experiment seems a bit weird now, but I think in hindsight it will make a lot of sense as we become more invested in technologies that don't just do things for us but can communicate with us as well. It's true, yeah, with technologies like Siri is a really popular example of these personal digital assistants that have artificial intelligence that allow us to ask some questions and they can complete commands or make conversation with us or becoming more popular. Hitchbot might seem a little bit weird or cookie now, but I think in hindsight it will make a lot of sense and it will be able to speak a lot to this particular moment. Tom Everett, a curator of communications at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Tom, thank you for telling us about it. Hey, thanks for picking us up. This was Science Alive.