Sanger sequencing was invented in 1977 and according to Google the first commercial automated system using this method was brought to market in 1987.

NGS was not a revolution in robotics. It was a revolution in biotech that enabled new and faster ways to sequence

By that definition we've had semi autonomous robots since the first car in the 1800s.

There are not that many surgical robots on the market...

There are many autonomous machines (which I guess you could call robots) in a hospital. Autoclaves, scrub machines, blood sample analyzers. But there is a big gap from that to the work physicians perform.