Watch this robot as it learns to stitch up wounds

Though many doctors today get help from robots for procedures ranging from hernia repairs to coronary bypasses, those are used to assist surgeons, not replace them. This new research marks progress toward robots that can operate more autonomously on very intricate, complicated tasks like suturing. The lessons learned in its development could also be useful in other fields of robotics. "From a robotics perspective, this is a really challenging manipulation task," says Ken Goldberg, a researcher at UC Berkeley and director of the lab that worked on the robot. One issue is that shiny or reflective objects like needles can throw off a robot's image sensors.