[wordup] Self-taught Chinese robot builder

[Adam Shand]

From:  
http://www.china-pictorial.com/chpic/htdocs/English/content/200405/7 
-2.htm
Via: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/003793.php

My Robot
A Rural Inventor Struggles to Keep Building
Text and photographs by Brian Calvert

On the outskirts of Beijing, in a small village of red-bricked farms  
flanked by rows of fields, lives an unlikely inventor. Wu Yulu, a  
41-year-old repairman, builds robots of his own designs, using nothing  
but scrap and a fifth-grade education. He spends more than two-thirds  
of his monthly 1,000-rmb salary on an obsession that keeps him up at  
night and has plunged his family into debt.

Such single-minded dedication to invention is rare, and rarer still in  
China's farming communities, where life usually centers around the  
family and the harvest. And though he has never sold a single robot, Wu  
won't stop. He's been building robots for years, he said, starting with  
nothing but a compulsion to see how things worked.

In a bid to earn a little money from his obsession, Wu built a giant  
eight-legged robot the size of a pony, one that can carry a single  
person and that he hoped children will pay to ride during local  
festivals. It was the act of a desperate man, a man caught between his  
love of machines and the demands of his family. The machine cost 8,000  
yuan, and was finished late last year.

"This is the biggest one yet," he said, flashing a look of pride at his  
wife before mounting the giant walking machine for a test drive through  
the village.

Wu hit the start switch and the monster lurched to life, thumping as  
the rusty tractor cogs and wheels inside it began to spin and turn. It  
was in November, and a warming afternoon had started melting the snow  
in the villages narrow alleyways, slicking them with mud. Wu and his  
machine headed straight out of the gate. The rattling machine did  
pretty well, too, its eight legs carrying it through the slick alley  
and soft mud, until Wu rounded a corner that led to a street paved with  
concrete. The hard surface proved too much for the walker. A strut came  
loose and scraped along the road for a few meters before the whole  
machine shut down, as a crowd of onlookers gathered.

"It's too tired!" called one old woman, laughing.

Undaunted, Wu dismounted, and called for one of his sons, who soon  
showed up hauling a portable arc welder on a bicycle-trailer. Ignoring  
the heckling, curious crowd, Wu got to work, and within a few minutes,  
the machine was able to limp back down the muddy alley and into his  
compound.

"He devoted all his money into this," Dong said. "He gives his love to  
the robots [and] he'll never, never, never stop."

With a different upbringing or education perhaps, Wu might have become  
an engineer. But his teachers were no good when he was school-aged, he  
said, so he stopped going. He learned to make robots by making  
mistakes.

"I refused anyone who pushes something into my head," he said in a  
recent interview. "I'm only thinking my way."

He's never actually considered what his little machines would do for  
him in the long run. He just knows he likes to build them.

His wife, Dong Shuyan, standing in a yard littered with scraps and  
rusted skeletons of neglected inventions as her two teen-age sons help  
their father, said she hoped that this time Wu would find a way to  
start repaying the family's debt, a figure that has risen past 20,000  
yuan. They had to borrow money from their neighbors and the local  
government to build the walker. That loan was added to the money they'd  
had to borrow after an electrical fire that started with one of Wu's  
inventions burned down their house and almost everything in it.

Wu said he felt sorry about that, but the fire hadn't stopped him from  
thinking up new projects.

Nor was that fire the first time his obsession hurt his loved ones. Wu  
grew up up in a family where sometimes there was "no oil for cooking,"  
Dong said. Once, the family scraped all its money together and bought  
him a remote-control car. He broke their hearts, she said, when he  
immediately took it apart to see how it worked.

"Please do not keep going on," she used to tell him. "You need to pay  
more attention to the family."
  Eventually she stopped asking because, she said, "it's no use."

Wu's other robots constitute motley assemblies of wires and gears in  
shapes inspired by a farm's natural surroundings: Next to the robot  
that looks like a grasshopper is the one that looks like a frog. Some  
of the robots hop, others crawl. One lights cigarettes and pours tea.  
None of them earn money, but all of them are labors of love.

"The best part is when it's finished," Wu says, "when it's alive."

I talked to Dong in February, to see if the eight-legged walker had  
made any money for the family.

"No," she told me, it hadn't. But now Wu was planning on building a new  
robot, from the toes up. This one, he promised, would be able to do  
anything the human body could. Work was already underway.

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Wu Yulu (right) devotes most of his time, energy and money into 
building his robots, despite the pleas of his wife, Dong Shuyan (left), 
to pay more attention to the family.

Wu Yulu grimaces as his walker, "the biggest one yet," breaks down in 
front of his neighbors.
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Many of Wu Yulu's designs mimic creatures from rural life, like a 
grasshopper (above).