Sometimes the inspiration for a new post comes from a scientific paper, a conference, or a historical archive. This one started in a consultation room. Recently, while discussing robotic surgery with one of my patients, he mentioned that he was related to Manuel Alique, one of the pioneers of robotics in Spain. He had come across my activity on social media and my long-standing involvement with robotic surgery. Our conversation quickly moved beyond medicine and into engineering, history, and technology.
Like many surgeons fascinated by robotics, I knew the broad story. Industrial robots appeared first. Surgical robots came later (now we are going back to indutrial robots in Medicine). But I had never stopped to think about the people who introduced robotics into Spain in my closest evironment. That conversation led me to discover the legacy of Manuel Alique Page.
When the public thinks about robots in Medicine today, the image that often comes to mind is a surgical robot such as the da Vinci system. Yet robotic surgery is a very recent chapter in a much longer story. Long before robots entered hospitals, they were transforming factories. The first industrial robots were designed to perform repetitive tasks with extraordinary precision and reliability. Welding, assembling, transporting parts, and operating in environments that were dangerous or uncomfortable for humans became the natural domain of robotic manipulators.
By the early 1980s, Spain was beginning to embrace this technological revolution. Manuel Alique (Madrid, 1921 – 1993) was among the engineers and academics who understood that robotics would become a strategic technology for the country’s industrial future. He was already discusing robotics and AI in 1985. At a time when robotic systems were still rare in Spain, he advocated for their development and adoption as a necessary step toward industrial competitiveness.
The most important contribution of industrial robotics was not the robot arm itself. It was the development of a completely new relationship between humans and machines. Industrial engineers learned how to translate human intention into robotic movement. They developed control systems, actuators, sensors, kinematic models, and safety mechanisms capable of reproducing complex tasks with remarkable consistency. Those same principles would later become the foundation of surgical robotics.
In fact, many of the concepts that define modern robotic surgery were first refined in industrial settings: precision beyond normal human capability, motion scaling, elimination of unwanted tremor, telemanipulation, human-machine interfaces, computer-assisted control…
The journey from the factory floor to the operating theatre was not a leap. It was a gradual technological evolution. Today, robotic surgery is often presented as a medical innovation. And it certainly is. But its technological DNA was inherited from generations of engineers who solved problems far removed from healthcare. Yet the tools, concepts, and control systems they developed eventually made robotic surgery possible. Without industrial robotics, there would be no robotic surgery. Without engineers willing to imagine new forms of human-machine collaboration, there would be no TORS, no robotic supermicrosurgery.
As robotic surgery continues to evolve through artificial intelligence, automation, image guidance, and digital twins… it is worth remembering where the journey began. The future of surgical robotics may be written in hospitals and research laboratories, but many of its foundations were laid decades ago by pioneers of industrial automation.
J Granell. Jun 11, 2026
Visita virtual a la sala creadores.es (Sala de la Innovación Española): https://muncyt.peragallo.es/coruna.html