Several readers alerted us to Roland Piquepaille's latest weblog entry about a robot equipped with a device that allows it to take fingerprints from suspicious packages that would normally have to be destroyed by bomb disposal teams. Photos and a detailed description of the new device, known as the "Robot Accessory for Fuming Fingerprint Evidence" or RAFFE, can be found in a paper (PDF format) presented in the March 2004 of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. There is also a related Slashdot article.