2005年NPR美国国家公共电台三月-In Arm Wrestling, Teen Beats Robots Hands（在线收听）

It was woman against machine at an arm-wrestling competition yesterday in San Diego.
"And as soon as we say, go, go ahead."
In one corner, 17-year-old Panna Felsen, a high school studentand amateur robot builder, 5 feet 7 inches tall and 120 pounds, and the other 3 different versions of robotic arms made out of electro-active polymers. Let's just say the robots didn't stand a chance against the young Miss Felsen. The competition was organized by Yoseph Bar-Cohen , a senior researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"Welcome."
"Thank you and pleased to be here."
"I wonder if you could explain, first of all, exactly what electro-active polymers are and how they work."
"We're talking about effectively plastic when you subject this plastic material to electrical stimulation , they change shape. For a long time, there have been known as a material that generate this kind of response. But not at the level that we started to see lately.Since the early 90s, we started to see growing capability of these materials. And, but the force was still lagging behind and that's why we have this challenge."
"So, there is something in the way that these electro-active polymers respond that led you to think :"Aha, let's test them out with an arm-wrestling competition."
"That's right. Since we,we started naming them the artificial muscle because of their characteristic response, I thought it would be nice to have a way to measure the advances in this field where we take human as our base line."
"And were they being controlled by people?"
"Well, once the competition started, I counted to 3. They turned it on and left it to do the wrestling. It was not controlled in any way, it was left to turn against the arm of Panna. Of course, Pannna had the complex capability of a human hand as opposed to those arms that all they knew how to do is turn against her arm."
"Aha, that opposable thumb maybe stood her in good stead against the robots."
"That give her quite an advantage of course, and because she has her own ,what we call sensors, sensors that she feel what's going on as opposed to those arms."
"Well, Panna Felsen says she's not very strong, but she made pretty quick work out of these robotic arms.It took her 24 seconds to wring down the first one; then 4 seconds and then 3 seconds to defeat the last arm. How do you read those results?"
"She got practice on the job, that's one possibility. We could also read it :maybe that this is also the weighting of strength of those arms, that's also a possibility. We still need to do some analysis of what we had here, but the fact that we had arms that just held a little bit is quite an accomplishment."
"Even if it's for 3 seconds."
"Exactly, if you compare that to flight. I don't remember how many seconds a flight, first flight was, but to one that many minutes more than now, we have done yesterday."
"If you are looking for possible future advances in medical science, say, what applications might there be for this technology?"
"Just like we have now artificial organs, like the artificial kidney, artificial heart and so on, I'm hoping to have an added item to the list. That is practical.That will be artificial muscles, maybe some kind of a glove that you wear that can help people that have problem with their hand. It could be an exoskeleton that people can wear maybe and will replace even their wheel-chair. Those are possibilities that you start thinking: maybe this is becoming possible, if we can make those muscle do actual ,those much better than we have them today."
"Well, Mr.Bar-Cohen, thanks for talking with us."
"My pleasure."
Yoseph Bar-Cohen of NASA's Jet-Propulsion Laboratory. He organized the arm-wrestling competition between a human and various robotic arms, which the human, 17-year-old Panna Felsen, won handily yesterday in San Diego.

And there is a photo of Panna Felsen competing against one of the robotic arms at our website, npr.org.
High school senior Panna Felsen, 17, arm wrestles an artificial arm built by a team from Virginia Tech. It's one of three robotic arms she defeated in Monday's international competition held in San Diego, Calif. NASA/JPL
  原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2005/40513.html