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’re the best toys out there,” says Howle Choset at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Choset 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 mobile robots similar to small cars.
Hoping to continue working on robots, he studied computer science in college. But when he got to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Choset’s labmates were working on something even cooler than remotely controlled cars: robotic snakes. Some robots can move only forward, backward, left and right. But snakes can twist(扭曲) in many directions and travel over a lot of different types of terrain(地形). “Snakes are far more interesting than the cars,” Choset concluded.
After he started working at Carnegie Mellon, Choset and his colleagues there began developing their own snake robots. Choset’s team programmed robots to perform. the same movements as real snakes, such as sliding and inching forward. The robots also moved in ways that snakes usually don’t, such as rolling. Choset’s snake robots could crawl(爬行) through the grass, swim in a pond and even climb a flagpole.
But Choset wondered if his snakes might be useful for medicine as well. For some heart surgeries, the doctor has to open a patient’s chest, cutting through the breastbone. Recovering from these surgeries can be very painful. What if the doctor could perform. the operation by instead 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, to investigate the idea. Zenati practiced using the robot on a plastic model of the chest and they tested the robot in pigs.
A company called Medrobotics in Boston is now adapting the technology to 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.
16. Choset began to build robots in high school.