Wu Yulu's robot

　　They can walk, light matches and pour tea. How Wu Yulu's robot fleet was created from not much more than willpower and imagination

　　By Pallavi Aiyar

　　Sitting in the claustrophobic confines of a crumbling shack that passed for a classroom, 6-year-old Wu Yulu felt his mind wander as the teacher up front droned on. It was the mid-1960s and in Wu's dusty village on the outskirts of Beijing, where the backbreaking labor of planting corn and wheat was the way of life, there was little around to amuse children. That didn't stop the young boy from entertaining himself, though. In the absence of toy cars and plastic airplanes to zoom about, Wu turned to another source of fun - his own imagination.

　　"I was no good at studies," he says now. "The teachers would keep talking but all I could think of was how to make toys." His first creation at age six consisted of twigs attached to a spool of thread with elastic bands. When cranked up, the entire contraption would leap around in circles, using the bands' elasticity to power its motion. When Wu dropped out of school a few years later and went to work in the fields, the urge to invent stayed with him. Three decades later, he has built over half a dozen robots that can walk, jump, change light bulbs and even offer a light to matchless smokers.

　　Now in his living room, in Mao Wu village in Beijing's Tongzhou District, 42-year-old Wu has obviously come a long way from his poverty-stricken days as a farm laborer. Shiny plastic flowers sit atop a DVD player, and a large poster of Wu with his robots at a science fair held in Beijing last September dominates the room. He now works as an electrical technician at a local cement factory and is a minor celebrity in the Tongzhou area, his rags to robots story having attracted media attention in the last year.