Need to walk around in a minefield? Then you need to wear the latest shoe robots. Developed by Franz Konstantin Fuss and other researchers at the Biomedical Engineering Research Center of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, the robotic mine-proof shoe can prevent you from stepping on mines. It's something like strapping a hexapod robot to each of your feet. If one of the shoe-robot's six legs detect a mine, they hover above the ground, allowing the other five legs to support your weight. It may sound silly but these robot shoes could save lives. Land-mines, despite being outdated devices with little or no miltary value, kill and injure as many as 20,000 people a year. (There are US and Global campaigns to ban all use of landmines.) For more details on the robot shoe, see the paper Development of Novel Anti-Landmine Shoe (PDF format). The paper contains graphics, photos of the prototype, and a schematic of the metal detector.