In 2015, a jovial three-foot-tall robot with pool noodles for arms set out on what seemed like a simple mission. Using the kindness of strangers, this machine, called "hitchBOT" would spend months hitchhiking across the continental United States. It made it just 300 miles. Two weeks into the road trip, HitchBOT was found abandoned in the streets of Philadelphia, its head severed and spaghetti arms ripped from its bucket-shaped body. "It was quite a setback, and we didn't really expect it," hitchBOT co-creator Frauke Zeller told CNN at the time.

HitchBot, a friendly-looking talking robot with a bucket for a body and pool-noodle limbs, first arrived on American soil back in 2015. This "hitchhiking" robot was an experiment by a pair of Canadian researchers who wanted to investigate people's trust in, and attitude towards, technology. The researchers wanted to see "whether a robot could hitchhike across the country, relying only on the goodwill and help of strangers." With rudimentary computer vision and a limited vocabulary but no independent means of locomotion, HitchBot was fully dependent on the participation of willing passers-by to get from place to place. Fresh off its successful journey across Canada, where it also picked up a fervent social media following, HitchBot was dropped off in Massachusetts and struck out towards California. But HitchBot never made it to the Golden State.

Pepper has become the de facto robot of the decade. It's 2019 and we still don't have adorable robot butlers in our homes to deliver ice cream while we lounge on the sofa or tidy up our floor-drobe after an especially busy week. And yet, as the decade draws to a close, we're also living in the most exciting era for robotics we've ever seen. Not only are the robots we're building more advanced than ever, but also we're having discussions about the roles robots should play in our lives, whether they should have rights and what our relationship with them should look like. The 2010s have given us robots that can care for us, robots that can wow us and robots that give us the willies.

Back in 2015, a hitchhiker was murdered on the streets of Philadelphia. It was no ordinary crime. The hitchhiker in question was a little robot called Hitchbot. The "death" raised an interesting question about human-robot relationship - not so much whether we can trust robots but whether the robots can trust us. The answer, it seems, was no.

As robots begin to appear on sidewalks and streets, they're being hazed and bullied. Last week, a drunken man allegedly tipped over a 300-pound security robot in Mountain View, California. The incident kicked off a spree of cheeky, only-in-2017 headlines: "Armless robot loses fight to drunk man" and "Security robot beat up in parking lot, police say." If a robot is getting hassled in the heart of Silicon Valley, what happens when machines venture outside friendly territory? The robotics era is beginning.

A hitchhiking robot has completed a 3,700-mile journey across Canada Sunday, capping off a research project that explores the relationship between robots and humans. A team of researchers from a group of Canadian universities created hitchBOT, a talking robot made out of a bucket, garden gloves and rain boots that set out on its coast-to-coast Canadian trip in Nova Scotia on July 26. It finished the journey in Victoria, British Columbia. "Usually, we are concerned with whether we can trust robots," said Dr. Frauke Zeller, Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University. "This project asks: can robots trust human beings?"

He or she -- it's hard to tell -- is short and friendly, if a little fashion-challenged. The robot employs artificial intelligence, speech recognition, social media and other tools to bum rides from motorists. Deposited last Monday on Highway 102 outside Halifax, hitchBot by Friday had journeyed to just west of Toronto. Its travels are being documented on Twitter, on Instagram and on the robot's website, which charts its progress on a map. The gender-neutral robot was conceived by university researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller, who view its quest as part performance art, part social experiment.

Mike Finley is a co-founder of AnswerRocket in charge of natural language processing and machine learning. Big innovations come in unexpected bursts. We grow accustomed to life and work as we know it, until something apparently simple brings about bold change. For example, we used phones for 100 years, but making them mobile transformed the world; we had the Internet for decades before the Web browser put digital education, entertainment and shopping in the hands of billions; and we documented our lives with physical pictures, paper records, CD-ROMs and thumb drives until Jeff Bezos brought us "the cloud." When individual creativity is enhanced by technical ingenuity, new behaviors and capabilities emerge.

Harambe, a gorilla, was described as "smart," "curious," "courageous," "magnificent." But it wasn't until last spring that Harambe became famous, too. On May 28th, a human boy, also curious and courageous, slipped through a fence at the Cincinnati Zoo and landed in the moat along the habitat that Harambe shared with two other gorillas. People at the fence above made whoops and cries and other noises of alarm. Harambe stood over the boy, as if to shield him from the hubbub, and then, grabbing one of his ankles, dragged him through the water like a doll across a playroom floor. For a moment, he took the child delicately by the waist and propped him on his legs, in a correct human stance. Then, as the whooping continued, he knocked the boy forward again, and dragged him halfway through the moat. Harambe was a seventeen-year-old silverback, an animal of terrific strength. When zookeepers failed to lure him from the boy, a member of their Dangerous Animal Response Team shot the gorilla dead.

The decapitation of the robot named hitchBOT has offered greater insight into social robotics. More than 100 million robots with social skills will populate the planet by 2020, according to a research study by Tractica. While machine-to-machine communication is based on tested principles, the growing study of social interaction between humans and robots draws on developments in our understanding of empathy. What will our relationship be like with these domestic robots which are about to invade our day-to-day lives? "We can compare it to our relationship with pets, which is complex, emotional and relatively thankless," My trip must come to an end for now, but my love for humans will never fade.