It’s been an adventurous three weeks for the hitchhiking robot that set out to travel across Canada one ride at a time.

HitchBOT’s 6,000-kilometre journey began in Halifax on July 27 and ended in Victoria on Saturday, and while the robot is pretty exhausted from the expedition, it made a ton of new friends along the way.

The talking, GPS-tracking machine relied solely on the generosity of strangers to get where it was going, and co-creator David Smith was delighted to report that the robot’s journey went off without a hitch.

“We’re elated,” said Smith, a university professor at McMaster University. “It’s been really great fun and to me it seems like it [has] brought people together in a really interesting way.”

HitchBOT was initially left on the side of the road near the Halifax airport and was offered a ride minutes later.

“It was literally less than two minutes from the time we set the ’bot on the road and the first vehicle pulled over,” said Smith. The first people to give a ride to the robot were a couple on their way to camp in New Brunswick, he said.

HitchBOT’s done a lot since then. It’s crashed a wedding in British Columbia, made a guest appearance at a powwow in Northern Ontario, and even showed off its dance moves when it did the Harlem Shake in Saskatchewan.

Smith expected hitchBOT to generate some attention as it travelled through different provinces, but he never imagined it would be able to claim international fame.

Someone recently told him that hitchBOT’s image was seen by New Yorkers in Time Square and that there was a trivia question about the hitchhiking robot featured on the televised game show Cash Cab.

Frauke Zeller, a Ryerson professor and another one of hitchBot’s family members, was similarly impressed at how quickly the robot completed its journey.

It moved really fast, she chuckled, “but we were quite happy everything worked out so well.”

The collaborative research project, which was designed to explore topics in human-robot interaction and test technologies in artificial intelligence, also demonstrated to Zeller that “robots can trust human beings.”

Before being reunited with Zeller and Smith in B.C., hitchBOT decided to take one last trip with Victoria resident Steve Sxwithul'txw.

Sxwithul'txw, a 48-year-old independent indigenous producer, had been following hitchBOT for weeks and reached out to it via Twitter, offering to give it a traditional Coast Salish welcome.

Sxwithul'txw thought this would be a good opportunity to show First Nation communities that technology is nothing to fear.

“I think [I wanted] the chance bring this into our First Nations communities to really reflect on how and where technology is and where it’s going, and not to be afraid of it.”

HitchBOT and his family liked the idea a lot, so Sxwithul'txw met the robot in town and has already given it a grand tour of Victoria. He plans to take a daytrip to Seattle with it on Tuesday.

“Today is kind of a relaxing day because it just got here so we plugged her in and introduced her to my kids … and then I brought her around town and set her up at the harbour.”

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Sxwithul'txw was amazed at how many people came to see hitchBOT, but he can see it’s ready to go home. In addition to having a cracked LED shield protector, the robot is not as sharp as it was when he first saw it on the news, said Sxwithul'txw. “It’s [speech] is a little bit more random.”

To celebrate the bot’s accomplishments, and to say thanks to all its fans, hitchBOT will be hosting a finale event on Thursday from 7 - 9:30 p.m. (PDT) at Open Space Arts Society in Victoria.

With files from Alex Ballingall

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