HitchBOT: They can rebuild him - but stop giving them money to do it

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love after all.

After the decapitation and dismemberment of the hitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot who went offline in Philadelphia on Saturday, the city has rallied to repair the child-sized bot and shed its image as the city that killed it.

The campaign to get hitchBOT back on the side of the road is an effort one fundraiser says will go ahead even if the video purporting to show its destruction was staged by a pair of local pranksters.

Meanwhile, funds have poured in to the point where a Kickstarter campaign — which has raised four times the pledged amount — prompting the creator to ask people to stop donating. 

Another Philadelphia group, the "Hacktory," has also raised the nearly $1,000 needed to repair the Canadian robot which began a hitchhiking journey across the United States two weeks earlier.

Under an update titled, "THANKS! But wait up guys!", Kickstarter campaign creator Nick Green asked donators to stop funding the project to repair the robot on Monday.

Green said he had been in contact with the robot's creators — communications researchers David Harris Smith of McMaster University and Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University — and that an update would be provided Wednesday. 

Johanna VanderMass, a spokesperson for Ryerson, said no one from hitchBOT's team was available for comment, and also pointed to Wednesday's planned update when declining comment.

HitchBOT began its American cross-country journey two weeks ago, leaving from Marblehead, Mass. and headed to San Francisco in a trip that is part social experiment and part art project. The hitchBOT had already traveled across Canada and through parts of Europe, but the robot's journey was cut short after it was found missing its head on a Philadelphia street Saturday.

"Philly kind of has this reputation of being a not very friendly place which I think is pretty undeserved," Georgia Guthrie, executive director of Hacktory, told CBC News. She said Saturday's events do not have to be the ending for the hitchBOT story.

Guthrie also said in a blog post if Zeller and Smith do not want to rebuild hitchBOT, "We understand… and we may just build ourselves a HitchBot2 to send along on its journey."

Guthrie said she has not received a full list of specifications for the robot, but it is built with a small tablet, some solar panels, a bucket, and pool noodles for arms and legs. Its source code is also online, and she estimates the total cost or rebuilding the robot is roughly $1,000. The Hacktory has received $900 in donations, while the Kickstarter campaign has raised $4,697 as of Tuesday afternoon.

Two Philadelphia pranksters, Jesse Wellens and Ed Bassmaster, are believed to be the last people with the robot, which tweets out its locations as it travels. Wellens provided the CBC with a video apparently of someone beating the robot.  There is increasing skepticism about the video, with many commentators suggesting it was staged. The Philadelphia Daily News says it appears to show a man dressed like one of Bassmaster's characters, "Always Teste," destroying the robot.

That character wears a No. 12 Philadelphia Eagles jersey of former NFLer Randall Cunningham, the same jersey worn by the supposed attacker in the video provided by Wellens.

Internet sleuths have also questioned the location of Wellens' "security camera" footage. Gizmodo showed that a Google Street View of the spot of the attack does not show any security camera on the building. The image on Street View is from June 2014.

Prank or no prank, Guthrie, who has been in contact with Green about his Kickstarter campaign, said she would still want to repair the robot.

"It's totally possible," Guthrie said of the chance the hitchBOT is caught up in a prank.  "To me it doesn't really matter because the outcome is still kind of the same. Somebody destroyed the robot, and then people were sad, and now's our chance to fix it."