Watch: Sony's new microsurgery robot stitches up a corn kernel

Sony has shown off its new surgical robot doing some super-precise work sewing up a tiny slit in a corn kernel. It's the first machine of its kind that auto-switches between its different tools, and has successfully been tested in animal surgery.

It's designed to help in the field of super-microsurgery, a highly specialized field in which surgeons operate on extremely small blood vessels and nerves, with diameters well under 1 mm (0.04 in). As you might imagine, this kind of thing requires incredibly steady hands, and specialists in this field often do their work whole looking through a microscope.

Thus, it's an ideal place for some robotic assistance, and there are a number of surgical robots already in clinical use from companies like Intuitive Surgical, Stryker and others. We're not talking fully autonomous AI-powered robot surgeons here, we're talking teleoperation tools that allow surgeons to magnify their vision while shrinking their hand motions.

In essence, this can completely remove the prerequisite that super-microsurgeons need to be freaks of nature, physically gifted humans with extraordinary control over fine hand and finger co-ordination. A good surgical robot would allow a much wider range of people to do this infinitesimally tiny work using bigger motions and far more wobbly hands.

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