Robotics has been steadily growing in the attention of the public and in the number of practicing people. Professional societies include thousands of members, and media attention has changed its dystopic view of the early days. However, the dream of “A robot in every home” presented in the December 2006 issue of Scientific American is still far away. The reasons for this delay are many: cost, lack of a “killer” application, lack of suitable technologies, etc. This book addresses the technologies relevant to autonomous robots, which are the devices in the public imagination, and we consider the application of autonomy to the domain of surgery. Before starting the technical chapters, this Introduction gives a brief summary of the robotics evolution and its applications to medicine and surgery. Robotics is not the magic wand that solves difficult medical cases and simplifies complex interventions, but it provides important support to physicians to carry out their work. Robotics raises the average quality of interventions and reduces the dependence on subjective skills. Thus it should be made available everywhere to everybody, but we are still far away from this goal. In the first section of this chapter, we put robotics and medical robotics in their historical context. In the second section of this chapter, we describe the ERC-Advanced Grant project ARS (Autonomous Robotic Surgery) that funded our research from 2016 to 2023. The objective identified when the grant proposal was written, were slightly changed during the years, but we managed to maintain the overall project goals. In the third section of the chapter we give a brief summary of the experimental setup used and we describe the experiments carried out. Some of the devices and concepts described here are repeated also in the later sections, but we thought that collecting all the relevant information in a single place would have helped the readers. Finally in the last section of the chapter we describe the book outline of the chapters’ structure.