(Corrects spelling of Intuitive Surgical.)

In 1961, just after America’s Sputnik moment, the world’s first industrial robot debuted at a General Motors (GM) assembly plant in Trenton, N.J. A company called Unimation had created the machine, a hulk with a four-ton arm that could work with heated die castings and perform welding. The company’s founder, an American engineer named Joseph Engelberger, now considered the father of modern robotics, hoped to revolutionize U.S. manufacturing. Yet by the late 1980s overseas rivals had blown past Unimation, as well as much of the U.S. robotics industry. “The U.S. is nearly out of the industrial robot business,” a U.S. Commerce Dept. national security assessment…