When I first heard about hitchBOT, I figured it was a joke, or perhaps a thought experiment by Frauke Zeller, a roboticist at Ryerson University in Canada.

I mean: how could a robot hitchhike across the country? Would its handlers be following behind it in a Dodge Caravan ensuring it made the trip safely? What would it even mean for this to happen?

But this is no joke. Zeller and a large team including co-creator David Harris Smith of McMaster University, are going to put their cute little bot on the side of the road in Halifax and hope that somehow the robot can talk its way to Victoria.

"This is both an artwork and social robotics experiment," Zeller and Harris told me in an email. "Usually, we are concerned whether we can trust robots, e.g. as helpers in our homes. But this project takes it the other way around and asks: can robots trust human beings?"

Seriously. I'm worried about hitchBOT! What if someone steals it? Or scavenges it for electronics components? (Of course, this is the point. They have engaged my puppy-belly-patting instinct, evolved over long eons on the savannah.) The bot itself is simple and had to be light enough for people to lift and strap into their cars. hitchBOT shaped like a bucket—well, actually, it is made out of a bucket—and it's wearing gardening gloves and Wellington boots. "It has some anthropomorphic features, albeit not many," they told me. "The physical form looks like somebody has cobbled together odds and ends to make the robot, such as pool noodles, bucket, cake saver, garden gloves, Wellies, etc."