Boston Consulting Group put together a slick series of infographics that track the evolution of robotics since the 1950s. The graphs show that robotics didn’t really make waves in the life sciences until 2000 and later – but today, robotic surgery is rapidly gaining a place in the medical community. All signs point toward that evolution chart flourishing in the medicines space.

Up through the 1990s, robots were largely used for automating aerospace, construction and agriculture. As the technology has become exponentially refined by the turn of the century, robotics progressed into the delicate biological arts – with the first real entrant a bionic arm designed in 1998. The Edinbough Modular Arm System has paved the way for dozens of robotic applications in medicine. Here are a few.

The Guardian recently took a look at the progression of medical robot technology, and whether or not patients are up for accepting it as standard of care. Check it out – “Medical Robotics: Would you trust a robot with a scalpel?”