Richard Yim has built the first humanitarian demining robots to tackle a global crisis underfoot. When Richard Yim moved to Canada at age 13, he was in for a rude shock. Children of all ages were running around freely and wildly, and none of them seemed to fear losing a limb or their life. “It was something so simple, the freedom to walk around,” he says. That freedom did not quite exist back in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Yim, now 25, wasn’t a prisoner, but he and millions of others in his homeland were held captive by land mines and other explosives buried under the ground. These are remnants of violent conflicts that began during World War II and continued during the French Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge regime and the K5 Plan to seal off the Cambodia-Thailand border. |