A hitchhiking robot leaves Massachusetts today with plans to cross the entire country — with a little help from its friends.

HitchBOT, already a veteran hitchhiker that’s crossed Canada, Germany and “vacationed in the Netherlands,” is taking to the kindness of strangers to help it get across the U.S. with a bucket list of destinations to hit along the way, including Times Square, Millennium Park in Chicago, Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon.

HitchBOT says that it is very “talkative.” If you pick it up, it will practice its language skills with you as well as test its knowledge of American culture.

The project stems from Ontario, Canada, and is the idea of Dr. David Smith from McMaster University and Dr. Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University. HitchBOT has a “sibling” robot called kulturBOT that travels to art galleries taking pics of artwork to tweet and so forth.

According to the release on its adventure, “hitchBOT cannot move by itself, but can converse with humans thanks to Cleverscript speech technology, which allows it to answer questions about where it comes from or its favorite pastimes.” The researchers say their goal of the hitchBOT project is to “see whether robots could trust humans.”

That’s an interesting twist considering that humans are worried about robots taking over and killing us and stuff.

“Trust is a very important part of this experiment,” Smith told Boston Magazine. “There’s this issue of trust in popular media where we see a lot of dystopian visions of a future with robots that have gone rogue or out of control. In this case, we’ve designed something that actually needs human empathy to accomplish its goals.”

While researchers admitted they were afraid that hitchBOT wouldn’t make it home, it’s popularity on Twitter, with more than 33,000 followers, plus people’s excitement and support for the project have revealed the nicer side of humanity.

The journey ends in San Francisco at the Exploratorium. Follow the adventures @hitchBOT.

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