Obituary: Professor Arthur Collie

Professor Arthur Collie, engineer and robotics pioneer.

Born: 25 April, 1929, in Glasgow.

Died: 7 April, 2010 on Hayling Island, Hampshire, aged 80.

HE COULDN'T read properly until he was nine, spent much of his early life ill at home and wasn't expected to live beyond childhood. Yet Arthur Collie went on to become an engineer, inventor, professor and island-hopping sailor.

Gloomy predictions of his life expectancy fortunately proved far off the mark and he enjoyed a long and busy career and retirement, pioneering a slew of initiatives that included walking robots designed to work in environments inaccessible to man.

One of them won him a gold medal for wall climbing in the 1990 Robot Olympics in Glasgow, another made appearances on Tomorrow's World and Equinox and sparked the attention of the Ministry of Defence and the nuclear industry. His other work included a secret air traffic communications project.

Collie was born into a middle-class family in Glasgow but was an only and sickly child and suffered from diphtheria and a tubercular stomach condition.

Fresh air was the order of the day and he was nursed at home, in an upstairs drawing-room turned into a sick room, the windows open in all seasons.

For some of his early education he was taught at home but also attended Hurst Grange Prep School, Stirling and then Edinburgh's Merchiston Castle.

He spent holidays with his grandparents on the Clyde, sometimes taking the early morning paddle-steamer with his parents when a breakfast treat was mince on toast topped with a fried egg.

It was during those excursions that he became fascinated by the huge steam engine that drove the paddles, a time he recalled when he began to write his autobiography, A Mere Mechanic.

He spent his National Service in the Royal Electrical and Marine Engineers from 1948 to 1950, specialising in telecoms equipment, and he ended up in charge of a mobile repair workshop in Germany. It was at this time that he met his wife Elizabeth. They married in 1954 and had two children, Tom and Margaret.

Collie qualified with a BSc in electrical engineering from Glasgow University the following year. He had been working for marine instrument company Dobbie McInnes in Glasgow during part of his studies and joined them after university as electromechanical development engineer.

He then went to Kelvin Hughes in Glasgow as a project engineer, working on the miniaturisation of products, using transistors and military air traffic control systems.

In 1960 he moved with Kelvin Hughes to Essex as a senior project engineer managing the project for the output display system of the then secret general situations display for combined military and civil air traffic control.

Five years later he joined domestic appliance manufacturer Kenwood in Havant, as chief research engineer. He specialised in electric motor speed controls using the then relatively unknown thyristors and achieved a design patented throughout the world. Another project involved touch-sensitive controls on a ceramic cooker hob.

By 1977 he was working for Turnright Controls near Portsmouth as advanced development manager, introducing microprocessor-based controls, two of which were incorporated in Creda cookers and washing machines. It was through more work on cooker timers that he became involved with Portsmouth Polytechnic leading, in 1985, to research into walking robots, funded by the Royal Society. The first robot was the pneumatically powered, six-legged Robug I.

Following a management buy-out of Turnright in 1988, he became technical director of Portech and led the group at Portsmouth University that produced a wall-climbing, insect-like Robug II, with vacuum gripper feet.

The media interest it aroused resulted in an appearance on TV science programmes. Robug III followed and a simplified robot, Zig-Zag, which incorporated the same gripper feet, won the Gold Medal in Glasgow at the Robot Olympics in 1990. Following the Robug II publicity, the nuclear industry became interested and a number of robots were developed for Nuclear Electric for use on reactors in environments inaccessible to humans.

In 1992 Collie was awarded his industrial professorship and two years later became a fellow of the RSA. He retired from his executive role at Portech in 1998 but remained a consultant until the company closed.

Throughout his career Collie was responsible for many patents, technical publications and conference contributions in the climbing robot field and others, and maintained an intellectual curiosity right up until the day he died.

His other passion was sailing. Since he was a boy on the Clyde, Collie had been interested in the sea and took part in dinghy and keelboat racing and windsurfing at Hayling Island, Hampshire.

His wife, Elizabeth, died when he was 60. Later, with his new partner Glenda, he spent about ten years island-hopping in the Caribbean in his 43ft ketch Bel Canto – the phase of his sailing career that gave him the greatest pleasure.

About six years ago he bought a motor sailer with the intention of exploring the French canals, and made his base inland from the south coast of Brittany. After being diagnosed with mesothelioma he continued visiting France to stay on his boat, until he was no longer able last autumn.