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Robo Lao Wu (Image: tribuneindia.com) |
One month ago, farmer Wu Yulu sold his “son” for 30,000 yuan – approximately $3,750. Wu Laowu (the fifth son in the Wu family) is actually a robot that Wu built himself 10 years ago.
“I couldn’t sleep for several days after selling this child, but there was no other choice. I had to pay off my debts,” said Wu, a 44-year-old farmer from Mawu village in eastern Beijing.
On the family’s TV screen, he replayed a video of Wu Laowu serving tea and lighting cigarettes.
Over the past 26 years, Wu Yulu has created 25 robots, and “they all feel like my children.”
Wu has loved mechanics and machinery since childhood. “Sometimes when someone walks by, I think about walking mechanisms,” Wu recalled.
Unfortunately, he was unable to pursue this passion through formal education. As the son in a family with five children, Wu’s parents could not afford to send him to school after he graduated from elementary school in the mid-1970s. However, the lack of formal education did not stop Wu from replicating what he calls the “extraordinary movements of humans.”
“At that time, I didn’t even know the concept of ‘robot’. But during my free time after farming, I tried to gather everything that could be used for these walking objects.”
Wu’s materials included tires, metal, nails, and screws collected from junkyards, or sometimes from farming tools.
“To this day, I still don’t know the laws of physics, but I know that electricity can power motors and transfer movement between the robot’s arms and legs using wires,” Wu said. After his first robot failed, by 1982, he created his first functional robot.
T. An
