It took only two minutes of sitting on the side of the road near Halifax, Nova Scotia, for this unusual hitchhiker to flag down a ride with a pool-noodle arm fitted with a yellow rubber kitchen glove.

That was three weeks and roughly 3,700 miles ago. Since then, hitchBOT, a robot built from household and salvage items, completed a journey across Canada that attracted a cult following around the world.

By bumming rides from total strangers, hitchBOT camped in Kouchibouguac National Park, New Brunswick, attended a pow wow on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and crashed a wedding in Golden, British Columbia. All the while, it tweeted about its trek, attracting more than 33,500 Twitter followers, and helping to prove, its inventors say, that it is possible to rely on the kindness of strangers.

"It is really defenseless," said Colin Gagich, a 19-year-old mechatronic engineering student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who helped build hitchBOT in his basement. "Can it trust a human to take care of it, to listen to it, to bring it in the right direction, to plug it in?"

HitchBot, which is 3.5 feet tall and weighs about 15 pounds, speaks with a female-sounding voice, but is gender neutral, its inventors say. Its main body is made out of a beer cooler, while the LED panels that light up its face sit in a plastic cake saver topped with a hat fashioned out of a garbage can lid. It uses voice-recognition software to communicate with humans who pick it up off the side of the road, and makes small talk in the car as they travel to the next stop.