However the word robot wasn’t coined until 1923 by Karel Capek and comes from the Czech word “robota” which means slave labor. In his science fiction book “Rossum’s Universal Robots” an inventor creates robots as a cheap labor force. However, the story turns sinister when these robots become highly intelligent and capable of feelings, realizing that they are superior to humans. They declare war on humans and try to eliminate the entire human race from the face of the earth [2].

Modern industrial robots however, did not appear until the 1950s, when Unimation (Universal Automation), a company created by Devol and Engelberg, developed the Unimate, a jointed industrial robot arm used by General Motors assembly lines [3]. The success of robotics in industry is due in large part to their versatility and capability. Robots are able to perform multiple tasks that are often unpleasant and dangerous for humans and range from requiring tremendous strengths to millimetric precision. It was not until the 1980s that robots became part of the surgical field. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center investigated virtual reality systems in collaboration with mechanical engineers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). They were interested in robotic technologies to develop a “telepresence” surgical system to improve dexterity in microscopic hand surgery [4]. The focus then shifted from micro- surgical to macroscopic general surgical applications, largely driven by the demonstration of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 1989 by Perissat and colleagues [5]. A revised telepresence system including a surgeon’s console and remotely controlled tele-manipulators was developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. These research projects eventually led to the da Vinci Surgical System (timeline summarized in Table 20.1).

Finally, we must make a clarification, the Oxford Dictionary of English defines robot as: “a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer,” but this definition does exactly fit the so-called robotic surgical devices of today [6]. Most of the devices available to us are actually master-slave systems, where the surgeon (the master) has full control over the device (the slave), so fully articulating robotic arms mimic the movement of hands, allowing surgeons to have greater dexterity and control than is possible with conventional laparoscopic instruments.