The First Human Opponent in the
Human/EAP Arwrestling Constest
Panna Felsen is
currently a student at Caltech and she is going to participate the SPIE’s
EAP-in-Action Session this year, where her capability will be measured to serve
as a baseline for future contests. In
2005, she was the human opponent who wrestled with the three robotic arms
that participated in the first human/EAP robotic arm wrestling contest. She won against wrestling the three arms but
helped making this event a historic one. Panna is a hardworking student who
mixes both education priorities and extracurricular activity ranging from
recreation sports to robotics.
In 2005, she was a student at the La Costa Canyon High
School of the San Diego
School District and is
now a student at Caltech. Panna took as
many as six AP courses in a school year––and earned all A’s in course work that
included advanced calculus and physics.
In her junior year, she founded an engineering club at her school for
which her robotics knowledge helped the team win KISS Institute’s National
Research and Design Challenge. She also
taught the members IC programming and led the design team that built and
programmed autonomous robots for which her Botball
team earned second place at Southern California Regionals. During the summer, 2004, she was selected as
a NASA Sharp Apprentice to do paid research at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, she plans to enter the
engineering field.
She lived in Encinitas, California, which was located north of San Diego, where she enjoyed shooting hoops
at the YMCA and occasional walked to the beach from her home. What was once training ground during her
eight-year competitive swimming regimen, the beach became a place where she
went only for recreation to ride her boogie board and to build extreme sand
castles––when she allowed herself the free time. Panna’s interests
began to change from athletics to academics when she was introduced to Botball robotics in middle school.
Panna served as the only student member of the San Diego Science
Alliance Robotics Steering Committee, the group that first introduced her to
robotics. She was also organizer of her
school’s participation in Science Olympiad, and on weekends, she worked as a
ballroom dance junior instructor for the San Dieguito
Cotillion.
To return to:
NDEAA Webhub or to the
WorldWide Electroactive Polymers (WW-EAP) Webhub or to
the
The
WW-EAP Arm-wrestling Webhub