题目内容:
回答题Wide World of Robots
Engineers who build and program robots have fascinating jobs. These researchers tinker(修补) with machines in the lab and write computer software to control these devices. "They'rethe best toys out there," says Howie Choset at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Chose!is a roboticist, a person who designs, builds or programs robots.
When Choset was a kid, he was interested in anything that moved —— cars, trains, animals.He put motors on Tinkertoy cars to make them move. Later, in high school, he built mobilerobots similar to small cars.
Hoping to continue working on robots, he studied computer science in college. But whenhe got to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Choset'slabmates were working on something even cooler than remotely controlled cars: robotic snakes.Some robots can move only forward, backward, left and fight. But snakes can twist (扭曲) inmany directions and travel over a lot of different types of terrain (地形). " Snakes are far moreinteresting than the cars," Choset concluded.
After he started working at Carnegie Mellon, Choset and his colleagues there begandeveloping their own snake robots. Cboset's team programmed robots to perform the samemovements as real snakes, such as sliding and inching forward. The robots also moved in waysthat snakes usually don't, such as rolling. Choset's snake robots could crawl (爬行) throughthe grass, swim in a pond and even climb a flagpole.
But Cboset wondered if his snakes might be useful for medicine as well. For some heartsurgeries, the doctor has to open a patient's chest, cutting through the breastbone. Recoveringfrom these surgeries can be very painful. What if the doctor could perform the operation byinstead making a small hole in the body and sending in a thin robotic snake?
Choset teamed up with Marco Zenati, a heart surgeon now at Harvard Medical School, toinvestigate the idea. Zenati practiced using the robot on a plastic model of the chest and thentested the robot in pigs.
A company called Medrobotics in Boston is now adapting the technology for surgeries on people.
Even after 15 years of working with his team's creations, "I still don't get bored of watching the motion of my robots," Choset says.
Choset began to build robots in high school. A.Right
B.Wrong
C.Not mentioned
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