Engineers build a robot to perform surgery without a doctor

In a high-tech lab on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus in Baltimore, engineers have been building a robot that may be able to stitch back together the broken vessels in your belly and at some point maybe your brain, no doctor needed. The robot has a high-tech camera on one arm and a high-tech sewing machine on a second arm. "It's like park assist in a car," said Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering. This kind of suturing is performed more than a million times a year in surgeries around the country, said Krieger, part of a team developing the robot and senior author on a recent paper describing the technology in science robotics. The goal is to develop in the next several years a robot that makes the intricate and delicate work of suturing more consistent.