"Sometimes bad things happen to good robots," said HitchBOT, the travelling robot. This little robot has accepted his fate with stoicism but the social media world is angry that he had made his way safely all across Europe and Canada only to meet a grisly end in Philadelphia where some jerk kicked him and pulled his limbs off.

HitchBOT was created as a social experiment by Dr David Smith of McMaster University and Dr Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University, Canada. This wifi- and 3G-enabled robot was equipped with GPS, speech recognition and access to Wikipedia so he could chat to people who picked him up from the roadside and tweet his travels along the way.

With his endearing appearance (HitchBOT wore giant wellies and a sweet, pixelated smile) and chatty demeanour, the idea was to see whether robots can trust humans. I have a feeling that when true Artificial Intelligence is developed HitchBOT will be handing over evidence of any bad behaviour and letting Skynet do its worst.

twitter.com/hitchbot