It's a tragedy that had everyone from NPR to the Washington Post dissecting smartphone photos of a dismembered robot. HitchBOT, a Canadian research team's initiative "to see whether robots could trust humans," fell well short of its goal to travel from Massachusetts to San Francisco over the weekend when Philadelphia vandals attacked the bot. Armed only with conversation software, the machine lasted just two weeks relying on the kindness of strangers to forward its journey. The US proved too much despite HitchBOT successfully traversing Canada and parts of Europe in 2014.

However, there may be a happy ending yet. Not willing to let robot violence scar its city, hackers and makers in Philadelphia are reaching out to the HitchBOT team to offer new life to the fallen Canadian after hearing about the robot violence.

"We’ll say that at this moment, if we get the OK from the creators to repair or replace the needed parts for HitchBOT, we’ll be happy to do so," wrote Georgia Guthrie, executive director for a local makerspace called The Hacktory. "If not, we understand… and we may just build ourselves a HitchBot2 to send along on its journey. We feel it’s the least we can do to let everyone, especially the Robot community, know that Philly isn’t so bad."

The Hacktory reached out to the team behind HitchBOT, but as of this story they did not have a public update to share. The group took to the Web in the hopes of rallying its community behind this Lazarus initiative in the meantime. On their next project night, Thursday from 7-9p EST, they aim to start either a rebuild or a new build and are accepting donations to help with the quick fix (the say the biggest need is a new tablet PC conversation abilities). "This is the kind of thing that a makerspace exists to apply our skills to," Guthrie told Ars.

Others in the city had similar ideas. Youngmoo Kim, the director of the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, offered to help the HitchBOT team via Twitter.

https://twitter.com/youngmoo/status/628160459754106881

Kyle Silva, a self-identified HitchBOT fan who brought the robot from Boston to Connecticut, told Ars the initial plans for HitchBOT included a return north. He said after the attack, the robot was recovered in Philadelphia, taken back to Rhode Island, and planned on being sent home to Canada. (See his summary on Twitter.)

Whatever happens with the original HitchBOT, much of the project's plans are already open source and online. So for The Hacktory at least, they have ambitions of helping some robot get back on the road even if it’s impossible to get their hands on the original. "The plans for the bot don't seem that complicated," Guthrie said. "We definitely have the technical expertise to put it together and get it working. But I'm hopeful that we can still have a handoff. There's a ton of energy and I hope we can do something positive."

Ars has reached out to HitchBOT's Canadian creators for possible comments or updates. So far, we've been unable to get in touch.