Just yesterday morning they dis-armed a 450kg British bomb in the Stuttgart Schlossgarten. A few city blocks were evacuated; fortunately it went smoothly.

My final design class as an electrical engineering student at Clemson University a few years ago required the creation of this "pendubot":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfh9upwZWA0

The first arm was directly attached to a motor on one end and on the other end was a free arm connected by a digital encoder (angular position sensor), feeding back to the motor.