For the last few decades of the cold war, the Soviet and US military establishments had been funding rather bizarre engineering research on machines that would amplify the strength, reach and endurance of human combatants. These were often called “powered exoskeletons” or “limb amplification linkages” and so on.
Now that peace dividend has arrived, here are a Russian and a US attempt to commercialize some of this research.
Of course these shouldn’t really appear that strange, lazytongs and stilts have been around for hundreds of years.